TWO THINGS HAPPENED upon leaving Andrew—I slept with a gun under my pillow, and I got laid.
No. Not at the same time.
* * *
Terrified that Andrew would become unhinged and use one of his many guns to kill me, my parents, and then himself in some kind of If-I-can’t-have-you-then-no-one-can-have-you frenzy, I slid the bull-nosed Smith & Wesson pistol that he’d bought me on my twenty-fifth birthday under my pillow so I could sleep soundly.
Initially I’d told him that I was only leaving for a few weeks to think about what I wanted for my future. That was a lie. I knew my future was without him, but I was too afraid to tell him that. In order to have the space to figure out what to do with my life, I asked him not to communicate with me during those first few weeks. He gave me three hours. He called my parents’ house five, ten, twenty times a day, and every time he did, my mom or dad would say, “She’s not ready to talk to you. You need to give her some space. Do you really think this is helping your case?”
After almost three weeks of this, I finally sat him down and told him that it was over. Forever. I was not ever coming back. Thus the gun under my pillow. I really had no idea what he’d do or how far he’d go. I even contemplated changing my name and moving to another city if I had to. Mercifully he slowly accepted our new reality, the phone calls died down, and we began that awkward, predivorce time in our relationship.
Unchained from my old life, I walked among other humans feeling as if it were my first time on Earth. Everything seemed fresh, like a new coat of paint had washed over life itself. Every moment was filled with possibility. I could do and be anything I wanted. My whole life was ahead of me. All the dreams I’d been bottling up for years could now be realized. Creative dreams, career dreams, feeling-like-I-can-finally-breathe dreams—all there for the taking.
But first things first—it was time to get laid.
It had been more than two years since I’d had any sex, and probably five since it’d been anything more than obligation of my wifely duties. Although I’d built a life separate from Andrew, cheating was not an option for me. I’ll admit I’d done my share of fantasizing over the young, hard bodies surrounding me at UCLA, but now that I was free to pursue them, I couldn’t see myself going to a frat party to get laid. I decided to turn to what I knew.
During the previous year, I’d been hanging out on Friday nights with my old boyfriend, Mark Lennon, and our friends Billy and Susea at Capri, a small Italian restaurant on Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach. We spent hours immersed in great conversation while noshing on plates of caprese, bruschetta, and butternut squash ravioli. It was a bastion of comfort. I’d often glance over at Mark and think, What if? So now that I had the chance to really ask the question, I did. I mustered up the courage one night to give Mark a booty call.
“Hey, whatcha doing?” I asked with a perky casualness.
“Nothing really. Just hanging out,” he answered.
“Cool. Any plans for later?” I was never one for direct communication. How does one actually go about saying, “Can I come over and fuck your brains out?” without saying it?
“No, not really,” he replied.
I saw my opening, and boldly I continued, “Could I maybe come over?”
“Uh, sure, but I need to tell you something.”
“Okay—” I said, but thought, Shit! He’s got a girlfriend I didn’t know about. Dammit. I knew it. I knew it!
“I’m gay.”
Whoa. I didn’t know that. My head whirled. My stomach clutched. The floor dropped a few inches beneath me.
“Oh,” was all I could manage. He told me how he’d come to this realization, and how he was slowly coming out to friends and family. But as the information trickled into my psyche, it made sense. Even when we’d gone out, we’d always been more friends than lovers. I began to cry. I knew that it wasn’t about Mark. It was that I finally felt my aloneness. There was nothing familiar about where I found myself after leaving Andrew. I realized that I was looking for a safe place to land, and I thought Mark’s arms were it. I saw now that there was no going back, just moving forward. My new life alone was now real for me, too.
* * *
A few weeks later, my best friend, Theresa, was having a barbeque down at her place in Playa del Rey. I thought, If there is a cute guy there, I’m going to get laid. Screw landing in a safe place. I wanted adventure.
At the party, there was a cute guy that I knew from Theresa’s office—Bob McCall. We’d met the summer before when I’d done some temp work there. In fact, we’d not only met, we’d had lunch together and talked about music, films, and what was happening in the world politically. It was so different to talk to Bob. Andrew shoved his opinions down your throat and made you feel stupid for having a different thought than he did. But with Bob, it was a natural back and forth, a building on each other’s thoughts and ideas, an organic weaving. I remember thinking: So this is what it feels like to have a conversation with a normal guy.
Now, a year later, unshackled from my need to be a good wife, I had only myself (and my loins) to be loyal to. Bob and I began to talk in Theresa’s kitchen, and I remembered how smart and funny he was. And he had blond hair and blue eyes. I tried on the idea of being with him. After eleven years with Andrew, it was such a foreign concept. We continued talking and flirting. Here was my idea of flirting—I taught him how to patty-cake.
I guess the last time I had flirted was in the fourth grade. But it worked. We were hitting it off. He was a bit tipsy, and we kept having to start over and over again.
“Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,” I said as I showed him the moves. “All dressed in black, black, black.” Our hands missed each other’s on the last beat. “No, it’s clap once, then both our hands come together…”
As all the other guests were outside drinking and eating on the deck, Bob and I were reliving recess by ourselves in Theresa’s kitchen. Her sister, Mary, looked inside at one point, saw us laughing and patty-caking, and said to Theresa, “Well, will you look at those two.”
After we had exhausted the basics of patty-cake, Bob and I talked and talked the night away. After all the guests had left the party, we both stayed to watch Saturday Night Live with Theresa. We were both being cautious, but I could feel the chemistry building between us. Just as we were getting comfortable on the couch, Theresa’s phone rang.
“Hello,” Theresa said. Then she looked at me, covered the mouthpiece, and whispered, “It’s Andrew.”
Terror shot through my body. Does he know what I’m doing? Is he stalking me? Is he really psychic like he once claimed? What the fuck?
I took the phone and turned my back on the room.
“What do you want?” I asked as coldly as possible.
“I’m at Santa Monica Hospital. I had an incident with my blood sugar,” he replied.
“What do you want?” I repeated in the same tone.
“I need a ride home. They won’t release me unless I have one.”
“Call Steve,” I suggested.
“He’s not around. He’s out of town. They won’t let me take a cab,” his voice getting more desperate.
My heart ached with guilt. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You’re still my wife,” he threw into the quiet space between us.
I didn’t reply at first. I didn’t believe that he’d had “an incident” with his diabetes. I didn’t believe a word of it. But I felt his pain. I felt my guilt. I knew I should just hang up.
“I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes,” not believing the words even as I said them.
I got off the phone and told Theresa and Bob that I had to go—family emergency. As I drove toward Santa Monica Hospital, I roiled in rage and decided that this was the very last act of charity I would give to Andrew Sutton for the rest of my life. I was done. I found him outside the emergency room on the sidewalk waiting for me, and silently drove him home. I couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say. I wouldn’t speak. It was the beginning and end of some kind of standoff. I had succumbed to this wish, but my silence said I would never grant him another. Whatever he’d tried to do had not worked. I was not going into the house with him. I was not coming home.
I drove away, furious with myself for having given in to him one more time, but more determined than ever to protect the stand I had taken for my life.
* * *
While I was clumsily taking a stand for my life, my dad was boldly taking a stand for his art. Like the great artistic leap he had made in 1969 when he went from clean-cut comic to counterculture comedian, he evolved once again. During that spring of 1992, he taped his eighth, and what was later considered his most groundbreaking, HBO show, Jammin’ in New York. Years later, when he talked about this show in interviews, he often said, “After thirty years of doing stand-up comedy, I’d finally found my true artistic voice.”
Although he did some classic Carlin material like “Airline Announcements” (my favorite line being, “Tell the ‘captain,’ Air Marshal Carlin says, ‘Go fuck yourself!’”), the show overall was a huge change for him. The most controversial and famous piece that emerged from the show was “The Planet Is Fine.” In it he declared:
The planet is fine; the people are fucked.… The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages.… And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet—the planet—the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!
These days, some climate-change deniers love to quote his line about the plastic bags and aluminum cans to justify their position. They don’t understand what he really meant. That line was an attack against yuppies—a group of people my father hated because they claimed to be altruistic when in fact they were only saving the planet to save themselves from the inconvenience of climate change. It was an indictment of the 1980s Reagan era that had turned a whole generation, the Baby Boomers, away from the common good and toward NIMBY—not in my backyard—thinking.
That aside, the main punch line of the piece hit many, including myself, in a profound way.
He continued:
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little Styrofoam. Maybe. A little Styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
Here was a hero of the counterculture taking a stand, not for the progressive Left’s party line about environmentalism, but for the planet itself. He invited us to step away from our entrenched daily political struggles, and join him in a new perspective where we could see the much bigger picture—floating in space looking back at Earth. He had found a place where we could detach from the Sturm und Drang of the second half of the twentieth century and find some peace.
He finished with:
See I don’t worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron … whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while.
As I sat alone on the couch in my old room at my parents’ house (I had not gone to New York to see it live), watching this unfold before my eyes, I was terrified, stunned, and in awe of his proclamation. I felt the truth in it. I felt the freedom in it. But I wasn’t ready for it.
I felt like I had finally joined the world. I didn’t want to leave it now. I wanted to step into the fray, pick a side, take a stand, and make some noise for a cause. I wanted to chain myself to a tree, defend a women’s clinic, or register voters in South Central Los Angeles. I wanted to use my heart and mind to evolve the world forward. But there was my dad, my hero, now telling me to fuck hope. I was confused and startled. And yet I was also awakened, as if I were a bell that had just been rung.
* * *
Three weeks after I left Bob on Theresa’s couch, we met again. Bob had told Theresa that he wanted to see me again, and so she invited me to Inside Edition’s end-of-season wrap party (she was the production manager). I felt like a giddy teenager. Which made perfect sense, seeing how the last time I had been with a man other than Andrew was when I was eighteen.
The party was held at a bar in Brentwood. I walked in and found Bob hanging out with Theresa. He looked as cute as I’d remembered. We tried to talk over the music and din of the party, and then moved to a back area where there was an arcade and some semblance of quiet.
Within twenty minutes, we were making out against the Pac-Man machine. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Someone told us to get a room, so we made our way out to the parking lot. After making out there for twenty, thirty … well, maybe forty minutes, we decided we probably did need a room. Breathless, we each got into our respective cars and headed to his place in Playa del Rey. We made out on his couch for another hour. When his roommate walked out of his bedroom on his way to the bathroom, Bob asked me if I wanted to move to his room. I said yes faster than I probably should have. I sort of made up for it by asking him, “Will you respect me in the morning?”
He breathlessly replied, “Yes, of course.” Don’t they always say that?
Bob and I stayed in his room for three days, taking breaks only to walk down the street to Blockbuster to rent foreign films and buy food at Hank’s Pizza. I was the happiest woman on earth—food, film, and fucking.
On day four Bob got up and started to pack an overnight bag. As I rolled over, I nervously asked, “Where you going?”
“To my brother’s place in Lake Elsinore for the next week. He’s going to help me fix my Camaro,” he replied.
“You’re leaving?” I tried not to sound too panicked.
“Yeah, we’ve had these plans for weeks. It’s the only time he has free.”
“Where’s Lake Elsinore?” Knowing already that it was probably not close by.
“About seventy-five miles east of here, near Riverside.”
How could he leave? Who was this guy who could leave a naked and willing girl in his bed to go fix his car? I had only ever known the attached-at-the-hip kind of relationships. I also had stuff to do at this point, like study for a final I had that Tuesday, and to proctor another one Friday. But, if I was called to, I was ready to drop all my needs, duties, and appointments to disappear into his life.
Not wanting to appear too needy, I got dressed, and we made plans to see each other when he got home. And then I left.
While thoughts of Bob—how he smelled, how he felt, how he made me feel—cluttered my mind, I distractedly studied for and took my final on Tuesday. By Thursday I couldn’t take it any longer. I needed to see him. I called him at his brother’s house and asked if I could come out and see him. He quickly agreed. He did warn me that it wasn’t very exciting out there. I didn’t care what was there, as long as he was. The last time I had felt this euphoric was eight years earlier when I had seen a very large pile of pharmaceutical cocaine on a mirror on the coffee table in my bedroom. I was happy, happy, happy. I told him I’d leave UCLA on Friday afternoon around two, and he began to give me directions.
He began with “Take the 10 East to the 110 South to the 91 East. Take that for about thirty miles—”
My stomach did a somersault.
“The traffic will be horrible on a Friday,” he continued.
My lips began to feel fuzzy, as did my head.
“Uh-huh,” I said casually, trying to mask the rising panic in my chest. I finished up the conversation pretending to be the kind of person who could easily drive seventy-five miles by herself in a car without thinking that she’s dying from a heart attack or having a stroke. I couldn’t let on that I was in fact a crazy person who hadn’t driven more than seven or eight miles away from my home in more than six years. I wouldn’t let myself fuck this up.
After I’d proctored the final on Friday, I headed east on the 10 freeway. I threw Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes into my cassette player, and distracted myself by singing along. I made it down the 110, “You see you don’t have to live like a refugee/(Don’t have to live like a refugee),” and then found the 91 East with ease. I was a road warrior!
But as I ventured deeper east, the highway began to fill with traffic and we slowed down to a crawl of ten miles an hour. I found myself surrounded by semitrucks, locked inside a canyon of eighteen-wheelers. The bile began to rise in my throat, and my guts cramped. “Don’t do me like that. Don’t do me like that/What if I love you baby?/Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!”
I was convinced that I was about to throw up on my steering wheel and shit in my pants at the same time. Then the adrenaline hit and rushed through me like a freight train. Breathing became more and more impossible. My head got light, and I was sure I was dying—absolutely positive. I saw a hotel at the next exit and got off the freeway, into their parking lot, and quickly into the lobby. As I searched for the bathroom, my limbs felt heavy and my tongue was like a sponge in my mouth. Once safely ensconced inside the stall, I took deep breaths, attempting to collect myself. Thoughts raced in my head—Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, body. I fucking hate this shit! Why can’t you stop doing this? Why am I so fucking crazy?
I knew the one and only thing that could save me—I needed to talk to someone while I drove. It helped me to feel tethered to something sane. I usually called my mom, but I didn’t really want to explain to her where I was. I’d told her that I was spending the weekend with Theresa and friends. I wasn’t ready to tell either of my parents about Bob.
After grabbing a Snickers bar at the hotel gift shop to stave off the feeling that I was passing out from low blood sugar (another fake symptom brought on by the panic attacks), I got back in the car and weighed my options. I took a deep breath and called Bob.
“Hello,” a male voice answered.
“Hi, this is Kelly. Is Bob there?” I asked.
“Sure, one minute,” the voice replied, and I could hear the sound of the phone being put down. “Bob. Phone. It’s Kelly.” I heard a door open and shut, and the phone being picked up from the counter.
“Hey, where are you?” asked Bob.
“Somewhere on the 91. I think Bellflower?” I replied nonchalantly.
“Oh, okay,” he said, sounding a bit confused.
“I’m calling because—well, I have a little problem. You see, I have this thing called panic-attack syndrome. Do you know what that is?”
“No, not really,” he said.
Of course he didn’t know what it was. He was a normal person who came from this really normal background, with a family that was really normal and far, far away from the crazy life and things that I had seen and done.
I was a freak. And now he was going to find out.
I continued. “Well, it’s this weird thing that happens where I feel like I can’t breathe, and my head gets a bit spacey, and I feel like I’m going to die.”
“Okay,” he replied.
“And, well, it’s happening right now. It happens a lot when I’m in the car. I just need someone to talk to me for a few minutes while I drive so I don’t feel so alone right now.” There, I’d done it. Now he knew I couldn’t drive by myself without thinking I was going to die. I felt alone, and stupid, and broken.
“Okay, so where are you right now, and what do you see?” he asked me.
And for the next twenty-five minutes, this really smart, funny, soulful, cute, normal guy talked to me, asked me questions, told me about his car, and made me feel not too crazy.
I was in love.
This was crazy. It had been only about two months since I walked out of my eleven-year marriage, and I knew what I was supposed to do—learn to be single, forge a path by myself, be like Mary Tyler Moore and have an apartment in the city, a career I could find myself in, and fling a hat into the air. But there was Bob with his grounded perspective, his commitment to doing a job right, and his normal family. He loved Japanese films, knew all the words to Tom Waits’s songs, and could cook a damn good marinara sauce from scratch. He was the kind of guy who would rescue a dog wandering in the street and find its owner and make sure it got home safe and sound.
There he was—the man of my dreams—something Mary Tyler Moore had spent seven seasons searching for—right in front of me. How could I turn my back on all that?
Once my mom found out about Bob, she was not shy about sharing her opinion about the situation. “You need to be dating lots of men. Play the field. Find yourself. I mean you JUST left Andrew!” On paper she was absolutely right. No doubt about it. She spoke from experience. She’d been with my dad for thirty-two years, since she was twenty-one, and never really had a life unattached to a man. She’d spent most of the last three decades mostly alone, while he was on the road, and she’d never had a whole world to herself. She wanted that for me.
My dad, as usual, took my side.
“But he’s not Andrew, he’s a good guy—solid, self-sufficient, no bullshit, treats her well. Who says there are rules about this kind of thing? She’s happy for the first time in a long time. Let her be happy.”
The good news was that I didn’t have to choose between happiness and independence. I found that with Bob I had no choice but to have both. The minute I’d toss any of my unconscious codependent bullshit behavior toward him, he wouldn’t swing at it. He didn’t even know how to play the game.
One night about a month into our relationship, he’d made plans to go and hang out with his guy friends at a bar. When I asked if I could go, he said no. He wasn’t hurtful or cold, just calm and matter-of-fact about it. I started to cry. I felt rejected, ugly, and worthless. He looked at me like I was crazy (because I was) and told me that it really was okay to not be together 24/7, that we could love each other and have independent lives. He suggested I go out, make plans, and do things without him, too.
I had no idea how to do that. I didn’t know how to pick what movie I wanted to see, or what meal I wanted to eat, or what career I was supposed to have, without sending any thought I had through the what-would-Andrew-or-Bob-or-my-parents-think? inner filter first. Although I’d lived a life attempting to be separate from Andrew for the last few years, I’d still been doing it in reaction to him. I hadn’t done it for myself; I’d done it against Andrew. I knew there was supposed to be a separate Kelly in there somewhere, but I didn’t have a clue how to find her.