Tell Me A Tale Of Sometimes Saddened Bodaciousness

How can anyone forget a real live Cat Ballou?  She was an actress, beautiful, just weird enough, often outrageously funny, a natural absurdist, a lady, of well-heeled background, a Houstonian, and most of all, Robin was, when I knew her, a sensitive woman who was being bullied by a Brazilian man to whom she was little more than a manifestation of his machismo insecurities.  

Take the time Robin called and asked me to attend a silent movie at a place called Club DADA.  The old , 1927 Fritz Lang classic in black-and-white, "Metropolis", a tale of a huge city divided between the owners and the workers.  A local postmodern hybrid of a band, popular at the time, a band named B. L. Lacerta, would be propped beside an indoor screen within the club, and would play a sort of soundtrack.  

Sounds fun, I remember telling her.  Most of all, I wanted to see her.  I really liked Robin.  Robin, I gathered, also really liked me.  In some ways, we were two weirdos, cut from the same castoff cloth: We liked upsetting apple carts.  In that regard, Robin showed intense professionalism, and that, of course, augmented her attractiveness.  

As in wow.  Was she ever lovely.  

I hear a honk or a beep outside.  She and her boyfriend are in the tattered asphalt lot outside the old apartment I laughingly called "the bomb shelter", mainly because the place was such a wreck, a wreck that seemed to have landed in an urban wasteland that had once been part of a sort of hippie hollow--before the rents went up long before I even rented there.  Her boyfriend: sitting like a statuesque hero in the drivers seat of a Jeep convertible.  Robin, who turned to flash her almond eyes at me, grimaced a little when I jumped into the back of the fast-rolling contraption.  her boyfriend?  He barely even nodded.  

Hence the grimace.  

Yes, he was jealous.  His jealousy seemed to betray (to me at least) his inability to see Robin for what she was: an immensely loyal person, a caring and lovable woman who, as chance would have it, had been lunge-leashed by a controlling man.  Muscular, curt, and often exuding an almost childish need to feel in control of all situations, perhaps he was the apple of all female onlookers eyes.  I sort of knew how that felt, but mine is a far different story, I gather, than his.  

We blew out of the lot.  Air pulsed in waves as the Jeep plowed through smoggy air, Central Expressway already a little too close to Saturday night gridlock.  At the time, although I felt emotionally drawn to Robin, I also chose to remain wary of crossing anything remotely connected to her relationship to the Brazilian.  

Thus, once inside Club DADA (he was already fussing with her), I decided to sit cross-legged on the floor along with the rest of the audience, including Robin and her "coupler"--only I made a point of sitting in front of the two.  A gesture of respect.  Nevertheless, the boyfriend seemed intent upon making Robin miserable.  

Maybe he sensed how I felt about Robin.  Maybe he sensed how Robin may have felt about me.  Maybe he simply designed to turn Robin into a complacent, obedient housewife type.  Ha!  I knew that'd be next to impossible.  As did Robin.  

This is not a story about any rescues of a damsel in distress.  While I knew Robin felt trapped (she'd indicated she simply did not have either the money or the job to allow her to gain her independence), I also had the good sense to not interrupt the flow of what to me looked like the decadent decline of something that may have felt good at the outset.  

Robin was solidly entrenched in the local bar culture.  Both she and I drank far too much for our own good.  In fact, this is how I met her.  One night, friends invited me to a local musician's house party.  Betty, one of my best friends, told me it was going to be a small affair.  Once at the nice home of the New Age musician and his lovely wife, a woman I'd met years before, I noted there were six of us.  That couple, Tom and Betty, and Robin--and me.  Likely setup perhaps?  I didn't take the gesture all that lightly.  I decided to sit back and see what the future was likely to say to me.  

Of course, I was high and drunk.  I was always high and drunk.  As Tom, Betty and the Skinners chatted, I hit the backyard: a nice, clean swimming pool.  It seems through blurry fog we all actually did go swimming.  But I remember how the woman, Robin, was already "drunk beyond recognition".  All I wanted to do was horse around.  

Meanwhile, outside a high wooden fence, a neighbor's dog barked incessantly.  The house stereo played New Wave, and apparently the barking dog figured that meant danger.  Protecting the fenced-in homeland, the dog--and I.  Ready to make an absurd gesture about dogs.  What did I do?  

I began running back and forth along the fence line, wildly barking.  I had everyone laughing.  I was a wild man imitating an even wilder dog.  Robin, prone on a chaise lounge, grinned.  She liked that.  I noticed.  

Thereafter, once again inside, as Kent, the New Age musician, gave us an audio tour of his latest piano and synth compositions, I sat next to Robin.  She seemed ready to pass out, and when she leaned into me, her head on my shoulder, I was somewhat amazed.  I put my arm around her and squeezed.  As usual, incessantly joking, I'd note Robin would snicker through the haze.  And the room was pretty dark.  That's when I put my hand down her pants.  

Whoa.  What an animal.  Had she resisted, I definitely would have backed off.  But her hand on my wrist said, "Proceed".  

Proceeding, whatever I'd planned didn't take long.  Robin entered Shibumi in around one minute.  Was this victory?  I kept quiet.  Robin drifted into sleep, still grasping my wrist.  

How's that for "whatever at first sight"?  In 1987, by the way, I was so out-of-control as to cause me some shame today.  My hobby?  Defying expectations, something akin to culture-jamming: I wanted to break through stereotypes.  I wanted to cut the butter.  As a fly in the butter.  Weirdly, enough, I often succeed.  I was more popular than I realized.  I'd had a few blow-out parties at "the bomb shelter", and strangers later, in bars, told me they'd heard about one--a party some claimed was one of the best apartment parties in Deep Ellum's countercultural history.  Quite a compliment.  Most of the time, I felt sad, alienated, lost, and worried about a future I could barely even grasp.  As a writer.  A poet.  And accepted for both.  

That's a longtime hurt that sometimes triggers me into a sense of exasperation.  In Dallas, if one doesn't tow the line of "rightist paranoia", one isn't about to get a chance.  That situation is especially saddening for writers and poets who choose independence over any kind of factional or partisan loyalties.  Dallas' big social club of socialites can be awfully harsh, commanded as they are by the notorious "Highland Park Housewife", a generalized image of "steel magnolias with money", women who went wild-angry when a local journalist produced a series of short stories featuring his impressions of them, impressions not altogether positive--and thus impressions to be excised from history.  Why?  

Apparently creative people in Dallas are either going to be lapdogs or outlaws.  I've seen the process far too many times to actually like what I see.  At the time, while rebellious, however, I was too politically naive and real-world innocent to have anything resembling "leftist affiliations".  Did that matter?  Maybe not.  I couldn't be a lapdog.  I am a human being.  Not a puppy who bends to the will of often less-than-literate socialites.  

Socialites, socialists, and social misfits.  What's the connection if not "social"?  

Best to be anti-social.  That was my take.  And take it to the limit I did.  

Betty: "I can't believe you did that, Gordon!"  Chuckling, she made as if to scold--as her husband, Tommy, giggled.  This is before high-fives were a thing.  

The next night, another party.  Cliff Martinez, a friend of the ladies of the Old Vic apartments, had a new, pretty cool space.  It was a sort of loft.  At the time, as artists scrambled for art spaces, sometimes those who had more money got the really nice digs.  Cliff is an eternally kind spirit.  We all liked him.  I still like the guy.  

I remember Robin standing on the other side of a bright, yellowish threshhold in Cliff's space.  She looked at me, and said, "I believe we have met."  

I looked at my shoes.  To be ashamed or not to be at all?  That was almost the question.  OK.  Robin's controller was with her.  I was safe, sort of, at least for the night. She and I were like two electrons, energy fields included, as we watched the machismo mind-meld with everywhere. Polite, I really didn't want to rock that boat--but I did want to rock Robin's boat.  

It's necessary to know that, 1985-87 was a milestone (or millstone) year for another relationship: the one Bipolar was having with me.  It's frightening to be beset with an emotional disorder you don't even know you have.  I'd known "something" was wrong for a good eight or nine (likely more) years.  I'd have what I called "fits".  No sleep.  Agitation.  Constant anxiety, and worse, deep depressions where I would isolate for weeks at a time.  Beyond all that, I was so overwrought with the poor self esteem that is an adjunct to Bipolar.  Then, out in outer space as it was, my awareness was often near zero.  With bipolar, one's instincts are marred.  And with Bipolar, one has either of two emotions: Up or Down, or Day or Night, Black or White.  Hence, I couldn't read intentions.  I could see the cues and gestures--sometimes. But all too often I misinterpreted them.  Lucky me.  This had been something of the case for my entire life.  

Good times, eh? 

Even worse is that I had been repeatedly traumatized as a child, the suicide of my father in 1970 being a real TKO that led me to see the entire world around me as rejecting me.   As I later learned, I'd had other reject-o-ramas along the way.  My mother, for example, was confronted with enough tragedy for a lifetime around the time I was born and very small: Her father--a vegetable after a stroke, in an iron lung for nine years.  That destroyed her family fortune.  Her sister--a lovely woman who had a nervous breakdown at 16 after accidentally running over and killing a little girl, right after her father had given her a new car.  And my father, a problem all his own--he had sexual issues no one knew anything about, and those were literally making him miserable enough to not want to live.  As Daddy saw it, he was nothing but a problem.  I have long wished he'd have lived to see some of the changes that ensued after the 1970s.  He didn't live long enough to experience a little release and freedom from the anti-liberty crowd.  

My mother also had panic attacks.  If Daddy didn't come home (she assumed he was getting drunk), he'd fly into a panic, shouting, waking me even when I was tiny.  And as many realize, small children feel their parents' emotions, and often blame themselves.  I know I felt them all.  Not too long ago, in fact, as my counselor and I continue to investigate the effects of both Bipolar and trauma on me, I've discovered that what even as a small six year old who'd been entranced by Alfred Hitchcock's TV show and "Vertigo", had experienced that kind of disorientation and confusion many times--I was repeatedly traumatized by in-home domestic shouting.  Stevie Ray Vaughn wrote "Caught In The Crossfire" about similar experiences.  This malady of shouting parents is not uncommon at all.  

My mother'd panic and yell--I learned to yell when panicked.  My father drank due to intractable circumstances--I drank when my intractable circumstances involved the Bipolar I didn't comprehend.  

Bipolar is hereditary.  My mother's sister, Helen, confused and institutionalized off and on since the Thirties, was seen as a schizophrenic.  She had Bipolar.  My mother's panics? Bipolar--albeit possibly to a lesser degree.  My sister--she has anxiety and is often a little emotionally isolate.  It's run a literal railroad track through my mother's side of the family.  Her father? He was a strong, warlike, and violent man.  Willful. A true fighter.  I laugh sometimes when I tell my friends that the family's "progenitor", a man named Jon Rives, served as William the Conqueror's Chief of Military Police.  I can only imagine the sheer brutality of that man.  To keep the Norman army in line.  Don't even think about the cruelty that must have involved.  Which brings up a suspicion: How many Viking berserkers were manic-depressive?  It's a thought I sometimes find interesting.  What makes a man wild-angry and happy to kill?  

I'm a peaceful man.  And a weapons violence survivor. I am pretty good at keeping my temper at bay.  Outlets for bad temper are everywhere.  I write.  I don't have to write mean things to drain energy out of me.  I continually work at stress reduction, and it really works.  

Back to Robin.  And another party.  This time, one of the ladies of the Old Vic had moved to a new, larger apartment, and held a housewarming.  I'd always liked Daun.  She's one funny lady.  She's now a comedian.  And deserves to be one.  Anyway, I remember standing with my back to a patio railing as I peered through a wide-open glass doorway of a bedroom.  Who did I see on the opposite side of that room if not Robin?  I decided to "make a move".  

Striding with casual mien, jauntily greeting no less than three of Robin's amazingly beautiful fellow actresses, I strolled midway into the room, and leaned against a dresser.  In minutes, Robin filtered to the dresser.  Then her hand crept into the space between our thighs.  The move?  I slowly slid my own hand over hers.  It was warm, and small.  

Suddenly, Robin grabbed my hand--hard!--and jerked it into the air.  

"Look what I caught!"  

Her friends were laughingly saying things like, "Throw it back throw it back!"  One of the most amazing meetings of bodaciousness I've ever experienced.  Robin said "bodacious" is her favorite word.  Boadicea The Victorious, I've later learned, was a Gaelic general, a woman, who went against a Roman legion outpost at the interestingly-named Camulodunum, and literally beat the holy crap out of them.  This British national heroine is from where "bodacious" stems.  

Bodaciousness was a way of Robin's war against the conventional wisdom.  For example, at a dinner theater, Robin played, I think, Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire".  What I remember most is when Robin, with a saxophone, practically takes the theater down with some of the loudest, most garish honking I've ever heard.  

Daun: "She got the sax from Johnny Reno!"  He is a reasonably famous leader of a band that was really popular at the time.  I still laugh as I remember Robin leaning way back and just belting the hell out of that reed.  

Later, we went to see Robin perform, I believe, at the area Shakespeare In The Park, in Romeo and Juliet.  That was after a number of strange collisions with Robin.  Not bad collisions.  Good ones, really.  

I'd asked her out.  For a Sunday morning picnic in Tennyson Park, a place famous for two things: the homeless population, and the high society golf course.  Robin decided to jog around the park, and when she returned, I opened my bag with the goodies I'd bought: strawberries, brie cheese and--what???--crumpets.  But when I gave her a pink rose blossom off a nearby rose bush, she started crying.  Poor woman. I know she was hurting.  

For one thing, possessor or not of an MFA in theater from SMU and University of Houston, Robin, as before mentioned, didn't have the money to escape what may have been a living hell for her.  And she liked me.  There was no way I would have allowed her to live with me in the roach-infested hole in the wall where I lived.  I did have a reasonably good job, but even so, I was drinking heavily.  As was she.  

We had a nice visit in the park.  But I was beginning to yearn for more.  Of course I was.  We'd generated real contact.  But you know: interruptions.  And I know Robin wanted to help me.  Of course, at that time, nobody, especially me, had any idea what was wrong.  Nevertheless, Robin "came to the rescue"--with a nice Chinese bowl with two lovely pills containing Ecstasy and a little heroin.  We drank beer, listened to Cat Stevens and James Taylor, and no, Robin didn't want to make out.  I think she may have seen this as a sort of medical mission.  One that failed.  

I now know X is not good for people with Bipolar.  Within two days after our all night X experience, I had a serious manic relapse.  On the job.  At an immensely powerful law firm, one top shareholder of which happened to be the head of the IRS at the time.  Not good.  I almost got fired.  I was in bad shape, and the office Human Resources director sent me directly to a psychologist--who prescribed Thorazine.  Was not allowed back to work until he said I could.  

My aunt with Bipolar, the Bipolar everyone thought was schizophrenia.  She'd been doing "the Thorazine shuffle", and I knew that.  The use of that drug, while it did clear my head at the time, also made me feel shame and fear.  What's next?  Terrell State Hospital for the Mentally Ill?  

This bit with Robin ended in a way when, the following summer, once the longing to get to know her had become too much for me, I managed to drink nearly a quart of citron flavored vodka.  I called her.  Got her message machine.  Said to the machine that I knew I couldn't have her and that I didn't want to live.  This was the first of a series of suicidal threats I'd begun making, something that alarmed friends.  

Then I passed out on the couch.  

Awake the next morning, I found a note pinned to my chest.  The door was wide open.  I'm not certain what the note said, but it was clear Robin had come running to help.  I don't even remember her presence.  

Whenever Robin came to visit (which she did subsequently), I told her to wait in her car and simply honk.  My neighbors, a nice pack of undocumented people from the outskirts of Guadalajara, included a couple of young men who'd hoot and say all kinds of nasty things to the women who came to visit.  Hence, in order to protect Robin from that, I had her wait in the car.  Except that time.  

A few years later, one of those neighbors, a really nice guy, told me, "That lady.  She come to see you.  She crying.  She love you!"  

Nice to know.  A little late.  But then, that lack of awareness had me shut down tight as a packing case at the airport.  

I did see her a couple of other times.  Always something in the way, something between us.  The last time I saw her had me drinking stone drunk in a punk bar called Loose Change, drowning my sorrows after winning $50 at the poetry slam across the street.  I was newly homeless.  Robin pranced in, looking bombshell and in a black tee: "Buy me a beer!"  Which I did.  And then told her of my sorrows.  

Interruptions.  Sometimes love is not fated.  This was no Dr. Zhivago situation.  The bottom line is that I had a really long way to go before I was ever ready for the stresses of a relationship.  I'm a little glad we had near misses--because, had we gotten involved, even toward the end, I would have been "hell on wheels", mainly due to the long aftereffects of Bipolar and trauma, combined.  

So much of that is now past me. Panic attacks sometimes do occur.  Sometimes those around me who haven't a clue seem to think those are hilarious.  After really unloading on a couple of doper friends of mine around 11 years ago, one did a "performance art" routine ostensibly about Quasimodo, the Hunchback Of Notre Dame, in part because I have a sort of William Barber stoop due to the same syndrome with which he lives.  

Robin, I hear, now is a theater professor at the University of North Carolina, married, with kids.  Sometimes I feel a little saddened by that near miss.  

It's hard to find people as weird as I am.  I know now I'm much safer among those who, as I used to proclaim during acid trips in the Eighties, serve as "my last link to reality".  

Yeah.  Me, trippin'.  I hope Robin is OK.