This blog starts with the story Pidney was telling me when she came in and jumped up on the bed while Mr. X and I were conferring over the design flaws in his latest surgical instrument.

Pidney is a black and white cat, a formally-attired cousin of Bustifer Jones in White Spats. Her name was Penny when Mark left these three cats with us here in his trailer in ’98. I changed it to Pidney to honor her when she gave me the key to diagnosing a kidney stone that was referring pain into my hip and masquerading as arthritis. I washed out the stone, finally, and with higher regard for Miss Pidney, whom I already held in very high regard before that.

Pidney is a “dog’s cat”. Leroy is Mark’s dog, a black wolf/alsatian hybrid. When he lived in this trailer with Mark, and for the half year he lived here with us before Mark came back for him, his den was the space under a table in the corner. Pidney would curl up in there with him to sleep. When one of them came in from outdoors, they would greet each other with nuzzling and head-butting. When Leroy left with Mark, Pidney spent a lot of time in the old den. She missed him, and told us so. She is the mouthiest of these three cats, almost as much as the average siamese. When we got Koji, she was the first of the three cats to accept the puppy, and now she and Koji sleep in a pile with me, on my bed.

Pidney is the only one of these three cats who will open the door for herself.  It doesn’t latch, but in some seasons it does stick.  Then I know that Pidney wants in when I hear her throwing her little body against the door.  Granny meows for a human to open the door and Muffin scratches.  Pidney pushes it open, comes in and meows for someone to close it.

Pidney is the most avid predator of these cats. If I leave an unscreened window open, all three cats come and go that way, but Pidney is the only one who comes in carrying prey. I know the nasal sound of her triumphant muffled full-mouthed cries as she brings it in to release and play with for our entertainment. I also recognize her boasting song when she has succesffully slain and eaten some vole, lemming, or chickadee out there. And I’m quite familiar with the agitated complaints, and the body language that demands comforting strokes, with which she interrupted our conversation today. This means she tackled some parka squirrel or arctic hare and got at least her ego hurt. I see no physical wounds.

Grammy Mousebreath, usually just called Granny or Grams but originally named Sassy by Mark, and also known around here as Meatloaf, Boss, or Sassafrass the Dancing Cat, got hurt by something she tried to prey on, or else she tangled successfully with some larger predator. It was the first winter we housesat here, and I was anxious lest one of Mark’s precious cats would expire on my watch, as well as having a lot of affection for the Catriarch myself.

Granny is the protofaluter. Mark had her and her four kittens when we met him. The tom cat of Sassy’s first litter, Tux, looked a lot like Pidney does, and appears to have sired a line of formally-dressed offspring in the local feral colony before he disappeared around the same time Mr. Bill across the highway saw a lynx catch a black cat in his front yard. Besides Tux, Pidney, and Muffin, that litter produced the queen Mark named Fancyface. She, Granny and Muffin all have calico patterns, and the pattern on Fancy’s face was… “busy”, I guess, is a good way to describe it: intricate and high-contrast.

When we first saw them, Mark said all four females had been in heat and he expected kittens in a couple of months. He really wanted to get rid of one or two of the pregnant females. We told him we’d been seeing some physical defects among the feral cats at our place across the road and would like to take one of them over there to diversify the genepool. He chose Fancyface for that. He said she was the smartest one.

She was so smart, she was the first one to find a way to the roof for the other cats to follow. She was the one who climbed the TV antenna and brought it down through the big living room window here. At our house, she made the indoors hers and held her own among the feral cats when she ventured outdoors. When the lights went out at night, she patrolled the house. She would hop up on each bed and stride up the primate under the covers, from leg to chest, touch the end of her nose to the human nose, turn around and go on to the next bed, and when the bed checks were done, she’d usually settle at the foot of my bed, on the corner of the loft over the woodstove, where she kept an eye on the main room of our house, actually a wannigan parked beside our little trailer.

Fancy and I bonded during her first traumatic nights in our house. She liked to be underfoot while I cooked. When I would clean the cast iron skillet with a scrape and a rinse, I would pour the soup over her kibble and she started taking up her station between my ankles and crying for “soup” every time I was at the stove. She came to me when her labor started. As I walked through the house, gathering towels for her nest, she followed, whacking at my calves and biting at my ankles as if to hurry me, or punish me for her discomfort. I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault, but she was mad at the world for a while, until her three kittens were born.

That first litter of hers was one of very few to have been born indoors during Doug’s lifetime. Most of the kittens he has sold in his career as the Kitten Kid of the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival came from the nests of feral kittens he sought out outdoors and hand tamed. This time both of us enjoyed having kittens in the house, and they were special kittens. They were so special we called them, collectively, the Faluters. With this, her first litter, Fancy proved herself a good mother.

Like a wild mother, she preyed for her young. When they were almost ready to leave the nest, she jumped up onto a cutting board where I had left an open can of cat food, grasped it by the edge of the plastic lid, jumped back down and carried it to the nest. In admiration, I took the lid off for her, but I have no doubt that she could have easily destroyed it if I hadn’t. Fancy had one more litter of Faluters before she too disappeared about the same time Tux did, when there were so many lynx sightings in the neighborhood. One member of her first litter became my all-time favorite cat, the feline love of my life.

His name was Webley Vickers Mauser. At first, on the occasion of the initial kitten tagging, while they were still moist with amniotic fluid, he was called, Whistle. They were Bell, Whistle, and Faluter. When they dried out and we could determine gender and get to know their personalities, they all got new names. Bell, an orange tom, became Bill. The name Faluter became generic for the whole tribe, and the lone female in that first litter was named Kenna to honor Terence McKenna, my hero.

Doug tagged the tom cat of my heart Mauser because of his gunmetal gray fur, which turned out to be all undercoat. As he grew, black guard hairs came in and he was another Bustifer Jones. He was fat, too, during his adolescence. I added the Webley-Vickers reference just for fun, to go with the Mauser.

He was a noser, even more that his mother or his Aunt Pidney, or his littermates Bill and Kenna, or any of the second litter of Faluters. He slept at the foot of my bed, too. He and Fancy flanked my feet, peering off the end of the loft in sphinx postures. He was my buddy, and my tyrannical boss. I don’t go out much. The first full day we were apart, a day I spent at the State Fair when he was nearly grown, he must have gotten annoyed with me for leaving him. Upon returning, as I was headed to turn on a light, he jumped up onto a table and went up on his hind legs to take a swipe at my cheek. Then he started the nosing and head-butting and purring. We grokked each other in fullness. I miss him.

But now I have Pidney and Granny and Muffin. Granny recovered from her wound, with my help. The first time I doctored her wound, I had to restrain her in a towel, but after that she would come over to me, roll over and raise her chin to expose the wounded throat so I could clean it and apply vitamin E oil. It has long been healed but sometimes she still comes up, puts her head in my lap and rolls over to show me her throat so I can rub it and celebrate our bond.

Muffin is “Greyfox’s cat”. Pidney picked me as her human, Granny favors Doug, and the cat that was Mark’s favorite, whom he called Prissy, treats the old fart as furniture. Greyfox named her Muffin because he could not keep Sassy and Prissy straight. He called them Meatloaf and Muffin interchangeably and collectively. By the time he learned to discriminate between them, the blonde had become Muffin and the Catriarch had become Madame Mousebref.

When we had a little ceiling fire here from a woodstove gone wild, as soon as we opened the door to let out the smoke, Granny and Pidney were gone. Muffin hid under the bed. She does not go after prey, but she will stalk the wily lunchmeat if there is a sandwich around. She loves to find a glass of milk on an end table. She dips her paw daintily into it and then licks it neatly off. She will walk up and eat from the plate on my lap, but when Pidney brings in some live thing, she doesn’t seem to notice. When Pidney tires of playing with her prey and lets it get away under some furniture, Grammy is the one who tracks it down days later and eats it. Muffin is more prey than predator in her behavior. Long after Grammy has exerted her dominance over Koji and Pidney has befriended him, Muffin hesitates to enter the door if he is near, and she will sometimes run from him, triggering his predatory reflexes. Blonde, I say.

Mark had all three of these cats spayed after Granny had her second litter and the two sister kittens had kittens of their own. Pidney gave birth to hers in the same nest with Granny’s and the two of them shared maternal duties. Muffin had hers in a dish cupboard and abandoned them. Hearing the cries, Granny tracked them down and carried them to the communal nest, then, according to Mark, she tracked down Prissy and beat her up.

Doug took all three of those litters to the Bluegrass Festival. Only one kitten came back with us. He could have sold D’Artagnan, the Fourth Faluter, several times over, but he decided to keep him. That little tuxedo-clad cat, probably from the cupboard litter of Muffin’s but possibly from Pidney’s litter, is now the last survivor of the original Faluters in the feral colony across the highway. Bill and Kenna and Fancy and Webley and the whole of the second litter have gone up the food chain. The offspring of that line, however, has enriched, beautified, and made the whole colony healthier. Faluters forever!

I had considered my marriage essentially ended from that first weekend in Japan when my husband left his little family alone and went to keep a date with a bar hostess. Back in the states, he claimed to see no reason why we shouldn’t stay together. I think I was quoting a movie heroine or someone in a novel when I told him that too much had gone wrong between us, that we could never get back what we’d had before. I was thoroughly disillusioned. Not angry, just disenchanted. What I needed wasn’t there.

I don’t know if his eventual agreement was genuine or just an attempt to end the discussion. It was capitulation most likely, an admission that he knew he wasn’t going to win this one. We would part, but though I wanted to part friends, he said he couldn’t do that. He and his mother, he said, would look after P-Nut until I was back on my feet again.

I packed into the MGB and onto its luggage rack my two bags of clothes, a travel iron, some toiletries, a shoe box of pictures and papers (passport, certificates, awards, releases from two psychiatric wards, letters, mementos) and yet another of Japan’s greatest gifts to me: birth control pills. I’d bought a tin of 1,000 over there, enough for three years. I don’t think they were available yet in the states. I recall some anxiety going through Customs.

The clothing in my bags included demure dresses and separates for job hunting, a couple of wash-and-wear nurse’s uniforms, and two pairs (one beige, one navy) of skin-tight-down-to-the-knee, wide-flared linen bell-bottoms cut high with a slit to flash ankle in front, sweeping the ground behind. I wore them with sandals and orange toenails–smashing. I could stop traffic in them, and in my miniskirts and white go-go boots, with a brilliant orange cap on my long coppery hair.

I found an ideal job immediately. The months of OJT at Halstead Hospital more than qualified me to work as a nurse’s aide. Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa hired me and I worked first in maternity and then on the surgical ward. Then I was suddenly too sick to work. The routine had been rough, stressful and exhausting, especially living in the car, but I’d made it through a payday and had enough money for food for a while if I just kept sleeping in the car. Suisun Slough, at the upper end of San Francisco Bay, has some beautiful backwaters and byways where, back then anyway, one could park undisturbed for the night at the end of a dirt road, then wake to birdsong and the sights and smells of the marsh.

I didn’t have energy for much job hunting or any other sort of activity. I was mostly just passing time, a lot of it in libraries in Fairfield and on Travis. One afternoon, leaving the base, I decided to stop in for a drink at the NCO club.  It was airconditioned.  It was Happy Hour.  For half a buck I could be tipsy enough that I’d need to dance or walk it off for a few hours before I could drive. (I have always been essentially a one-drink drunk.  Two is overdoing it.)  It seemed like a good idea, best way I could think of to while away the evening before I drove back out of town and found a parking spot.

I was in my demure daffodil yellow Japanese silk suit because I’d been to some interviews earlier in the day. I sat in the corner and nursed a Singapore sling and watched the place fill up with men, and a few women. A band was setting up onstage and I was idly watching. My mind was on my circumstances, calculating whether to put the suit into a dry cleaner or maybe just hand wash it and try to find a way to press it. During that homeless time and every homeless time after that, most of my energy went into keeping myself and my clothes presentable, an endless and fruitless task.

The band started to play. The man who walked up to my table had to clear his throat to get my attention. He asked, “Do you swing?” Well, just about everyone I knew was into swinging or wife-swapping or even kinkier things, but that’s not something I was comfortable discussing with a total stranger in public like this. Then he gestured toward the band and the dance floor and I noticed it was an old-fashioned swing tune. Of course I could swing! My father had taught me. It was about the fourth style of dance he taught me, after the easier two-step, foxtrot, jitterbug… you bet I swing. The only dance I like better than that is flamenco.

I wore out pretty fast, and we sat most of them out after I had to get the nebulizer out to get my lungs working again. We found a jillion things to talk about. His name was Jim Rose. He was senior NCO on a flight-line maintenance crew. Jim bought me a second Singapore sling. He said he had a place where I could sleep in a bed, a little room off a garage at a house where his buddy lived. We needed to keep the noise down, but other than that….

Well, other than that, the bed was a narrow cot, so that when we finally did settle to sleep, it was in a pile. I had a moment’s hesitation right there at first when he said, “Sit on my face,” because I’d had some woefully inept cunnilingus in the past. But Jim was goood. That, there, was an unintentional typo, but I think it expresses my thought better than the correct spelling would. Let it stand.

The amount of time that passed as we got to know each other, I haven’t a clue. It had to have been a few weeks at the least. He kept my car full of gas, and drove it when I got too high to drive safely. One weekend his  skinny friend Jim Root crammed himself sideways behind the bucket seats and we all went to Lake Berryessa in the MGB. I wore a new bikini Jim  had bought for me, and he introduced me to vodka gimlets. They were not quite as tasty as the Singapore slings, but refreshing in the heat. They were also not as sweet and packed more punch per liquid ounce, so I got drunk faster than I realized. We sat on a big rock by the lake and talked about Viet Nam and Japan, about philosophy and economics and politics. Then we lay back in the sun and fell asleep with his hand on my bare stomach. I carried his negative handprint in my sunburn for weeks afterwards.

It wasn’t the most comfortable arrangement in that little room off the garage, but it beat living in my car. Soon, Jim came up with an even better idea.. He said he and his buddy from Viet Nam, Jim Root, were going to get an apartment together, and I could live with them rent-free if I’d keep the place clean. That reinforced my belief in miracles.

Even before we moved into the new place, I found a job. We stopped in for a beer at the Paradise Inn, a small bar on a back road by Gate Four of Travis Air Force Base. That evening, eight or ten Green Berets in transit swelled the usual crowd of Travis airmen, and the barmaid hadn’t shown up for her shift. The owner was tending bar and waiting tables and going nuts, so I offered to help. I worked with him a few nights after that, and then he asked me to start opening for him at 7 AM. A lot of guys stopped in for an eye-opener on their way to work, and after eight the midnight shift off the flight line showed up.

Gate Four was nearest the flight line, but was unguarded and wasn’t officially used. One could get in, one just was not supposed to go that way unless ordered that way. The main gate was for ordinary travel. Like so many things in the military (and elsewhere, of course), it was okay as long as you didn’t get caught. One morning, we overslept and I was half asleep when he dragged me out of bed and tossed my navy trenchcoat at me. I belted it around my waist as we ran and jumped into my car. I rode shotgun and he sped through the back gate and across open fields and runways, and got to the flight line just as his subordinate had called the squad to attention for roll call.

I had barely enough time to speed back over the runways and hills to open the Paradise about five minutes late. I worked the whole shift barefoot, in my trenchcoat and nothing else.  I found a comb in the lost and found box and groomed my hair.  I was honest with anyone who asked me why I was wearing that coat in that heat. Some, I think, didn’t believe me. Others dared me, and tried to bribe me, to show them what was under it. I did not flash anyone until that evening when I picked Jim up from work.

I usually went in and out through the main gate when I took Jim to work in the morning and when I drove in around 4:55 PM to pick him up. I’d bring along a jelly jar about half full of scotch and a container with some ice cubes. When I saw Jim coming, I’d lean over to the footwell and put some ice into the scotch, for him to sip on the way home. He didn’t seem to mind drinking from a jelly jar. I was such a Pleaser then, always in need of making myself needed. Good at it, too.

Always my long red hair had been a major asset. Jim said he didn’t like long hair, and he preferred blondes. I cut my hair and bought a blonde wig. That is as close as I’ve ever been to bleach or dye. Now, in the light of further developments, I question whether it was a matter of preference for him, or if it was a dominance game. He was a control freak.

In a blonde wig, I looked like Doris Day. When someone on base saw me driving Jim home one night and told my ex, he called me at work and told me that my new boyfriend was letting his blonde girlfriend drive my car.

After about the third day in our new, second floor, airconditioned, two bedroom apartment with a pool in the central courtyard, the two Jims conferred quietly, and then Jim Root walked into the kitchen where I was washing dinner dishes after one of my usual gourmet meals, and asked me not to clean the ashtrays every time one of them put out a smoke. It was burdensome to them looking around for the dirty ash tray so they wouldn’t be dirtying that clean one there. He said they would try to mess up only one ashtray if I would try not to empty it more than once a day. *Yecch!* I thought. “Okay” was what I said. Whatever you say, Boss. Yess, massah. That was my style. Homelessness didn’t suit me.

Jim Rose and Jim Root said they were part owners of a bar in Saigon. A buddy of theirs was over there running it and they were going to retire to Southeast Asia as soon as their enlistments were up. They said I would be a great hostess for their bar in Saigon. Prostitution was optional, but if I did decide to go with the South Vietnamese officers, I could make a fortune. They, said the two Jims, favored round-eyed women. We were making plans to ship me to Saigon when I screwed up again.

It was Labor Day, a couple of weeks before my 22nd birthday, and the whole apartment complex was partying around the pool. Around sunset everyone was flying high, and a girl from across the court was putting the make on Jim. When I saw him go to her apartment with her, I started paying attention to some of the other men around there. I ended up in bed–my bed–Jim Rose’s bed, with one of them when Jim walked in.

He was livid, and according to him it would have been all right if it hadn’t been in his own bed. I dunno. Never made any sense to me. But it was his place and he said I had to be out of there in the morning. That night, drunk and desperate, I took every painkiller, tranquilizer, barbiturate–every pill in the medicine cabinet except the birth control pills. As the party was winding down, someone found me on the bed in a pool of vomit and called an ambulance.

I woke up in restraints, my wrists and ankles shackled by thick padded leather belts to a bed in the psychiatric ward at the base hospital. I could feel a line of fire running from my right nostril all the way down my esophagus, abrasions from the tube they had used to pump my stomach. I lay there long enough to decide it was okay being alive. I’d probably figure out some way to get by. Then someone noticed I was awake and got me dressed for an interview with a shrink. He asked me a few questions, then started telling me about the rollercoaster I lived on, and mentioned things like manic-depression.

As I talked to him about my recent experiences and my feelings, he commented, “You wake up in a new world every morning, don’t you?” Well, duh, Scarlett O’Hara, tomorrow is another day. I assured him that the night before had all been a drunken lapse in judgment and he signed my discharge. If you’ve been enjoying my stories about those trips to the loony bin, I’m sorry. This is the last one of them in this lifetime… so far.

My leg muscles were trembling and burning from CFS when, mid-morning, I perched here on this bed in a half lotus (just like today), put the sweet, lumpy, misshapen, roughly C-shaped, inexpertly hand-made pillow I paid a quarter for at SallyAnn across my lap and settled ol’ Schpeedy Trackbawl here into it for ten hours of writing before Greyfox came home. [Does that get today's prize for run-on sentences?] An old foam cushion against the wall behind me, which I salvaged from an abandoned wrecked camper, gives me lumbar support. I can comfortably spend hour after hour here with occasional breaks for letting the cats and dog in and out, and for more personal intake and output.

At the end of such a day, I am exhausted. Last night as I put Schpeedy away, tucked the lap pillow behind the nightstand and unwound my legs to get up and fix dinner, I groaned. Greyfox inquired as to the groan and I said, “I’m as tired as if I’d been working.” He said, “You were working.” And I said, “Yeah, but just writing.”

Then he told me, “During the war,” (WWII, I suppose), “when food was rationed, the French government gave ‘intellectuals’: writers, artists, teachers, etc., rations equal to those allowed to laborers.”

Their medical research had demonstrated that caloric requirements differed negligibly between the more physical occupations and ones where the efforts were mostly mental. So the next time someone tries to lay a guilt trip on you because you’ve been sitting around writing, or if you might be tempted to let a good idea go unwritten and be forgotten rather than put down that broom or hammer for a while, remember, (to the French government, at least) it’s all work. And if you pay attention to what you’re doing while you’re at it, it’s all Work, too.

Again, I feel the need to take a closer look at my state of mind at the end of my latest life episode. I had been through a series of soulmate relationships, the sort of thing I suppose every old soul goes through, little tests, challenges, lessons and rewards. A decade or so after this, when I would get my first-ever past-life reading, Aron Abrahamson would tell me that my mother and my children and I had a long reincarnational history together that involved issues of illness, abandonment, and adoption.

Hindsight, second-sight and all that jazz is wonderful in retrospect, but at the time all I knew was that I was an unfit mother, a dual failure at marriage and triple failure as parent. I understood very well that Al’s physical abuse had been traumatic, but I had never heard of PTSD and had no idea of the lasting effects of trauma. Nor did I understand that Al’s mental/emotional abuse and that I had received from my second husband was as damaging as batterings. There were even a few times, when I’d been particularly depressed or intoxicated, that I recalled the long suppressed “knowledge” that I’d “killed” my own father.

I was insecure and defensive, with severe feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.  One of the most common means that people have for dealing with such feelings is to blame others. Anything to take the focus off oneself. Other common coping mechanisms in such cases are magical thinking, fantasy, denial, addictive behaviors and suicidal ideations. I don’t know if that last is properly termed a coping mechanism, but it’s one of the things I was doing at that time, along with all those other things.

Life sucked. Nobody loved me. No wonder nobody loved me… just LOOK at me. I felt about as worthless as I could feel, which is not to say entirely without worth. I’d done it a lot of injuries since my father’s death, but the self-esteem my loving parents had given me wasn’t dead yet.

I started staying around the station more, but I read the procedure manuals, PDR, medical dictionary and patient charts, not trashy fiction. I was, at that time, just beginning to realize that I had a lot to learn. I didn’t want to waste any time. It was truly hard being so empathetic with sick and dying people and their relatives. But I didn’t know how to stop, and I have never really wanted to stop. I have, instead, worked to amplify and refine that talent.

My nursing career was derailed when I ended up in the hospital as a patient during an epidemic of influenza. By the time I was well enough to work again, I only had a few weeks left in the country.

After only a few months in Japan, my husband had made the stripe he needed in order to be eligible to have his family join him. P-Nut and I took a train to California. I visited some family members, old friends, and new in-laws.  Then we settled down in the terminal at Travis AFB for three days on stand-by.

The flight from hell, with my baby and a bunch of other kids screaming from the ear-pressure, and puking from the turbulence, was followed by total cultural and geographical disorientation upon landing. To top things off, there had been a rash of vandalism in the air terminal and I had to search for miles to find a functioning pay phone to let my husband know we were there.

He got us settled in a pleasant little hotel, explained that we would move to the base guest house the next day, and then find a house off-base. He went out and brought back take-out food… Japanese food… mmmmm… delicious, spicy chicken and peppers. The language and the cuisine were to become two of Japan’s three great gifts to me. (The third was the legendary Simultaneous Orgasm.) Then he explained that he had to go see his girlfriend. It was the weekend. They had a standing date.  It was the first inkling I had that he even had a girlfriend.

I’ve been sitting here trying to recall her name. It might have been Keiko… Sachiko… I’m not sure. Her friend was Mariko. They were both bar girls, hostesses the GIs called… [Was it "nei-san"? ?? I think "jo-san" was what the girls called the guys... It has been a long time, and none of those words has come up in conversation since I came back from Japan.] Mari and I became friends and coached each other in language lessons because she was going to be marrying her favorite GI and coming back to the states. Mari’s friend, his girlfriend–aw, hell, let’s just call her Sachiko and I’ll just go on calling him “him” –as far as I know, had no plans to emigrate. I never met her, but did have a few fleeting glimpses of her back. I always wondered where she went and what she did each time she disappeared when we went into that bar where she worked.

We used to take P-nut to the base nursery once or twice a week, to stay while we went to the Airmen’s Club to dance and see the floor show. If I won at the slot machines, and I usually did, we could afford to have dinner there, too. The floor shows were a mix of local talent, top acts from the States, and unknown American talent. A few months after I arrived in Japan, having repeated the pattern every weekend of staying home alone while he played with Sachiko, I met someone.

This Earl was another soulmate, fascination at first sight, intelligent conversation, subtle humor, and fantastic Black Irish good looks. I was head over heels *uh-ghin*. Earl was in obvious distress because this buddy of his, now his immediate superior in the squadron since he had made that new stripe, was married to his own soulmate. We contented ourselves with conversation off to the side of the dance floor as the others in our group partied and danced. Sometimes I was too sick to go out, but if I was ambulatory, I’d go.

After many urgent trips to the infirmary in asthmatic spasms, one of the doctors there decided it was all in my head. They had already nearly destroyed my ability to function as parent and housekeeper, with the barbiturates. Now a misogynistic first lieutenant decides to put me in the cuckoo’s nest, the psychiatric ward in Tachikawa Base Hospital. And what a nest of cuckoos that was at the time!

The place was full of twenty-some young men waiting out their Section 8 discharges so they could go back to the states instead of back to Viet Nam. Most of them slept in an open ward, except for the few truly wigged-out ones I could hear howling and bouncing off the padded walls of the isolation rooms on the opposite end of the ward.

I was locked into a small room across the corridor from the day room. I shared it with a Captain’s wife who had tried to off herself with a month’s supply of Elavil. She was heavily sedated. She had wrist scars from prior suicide attempts. She slept and wept and little else.  I ate most of her rations.

After I’d successfully endured the war stories the men told at a couple of the daily group therapy circles, I was allowed to go to the day room after lunch. One day I got into a monopoly game. There was a game set, but it was missing almost all its phony money. The men emptied their pockets of yen, wan, baht, and two or three other Asian currencies and we played Monopoly with real money, declaring all of them to be of equal value according to the numbers on the bills.

One patient there, a freaky, jittery, talkative young blond from Texas, won big. He wanted to give me the whole wad of hundreds of thousands of Asian whatevers, to have sex with him. Two orderlies were watching us through the thick window of the control center. I pushed his hand aside the first time he thrust the money at me. When he held it in front of my nose and shook it and wheedled and importuned me, I leaned forward a bit and bit his hand.

They put me back in the little room with the officer’s weeping wife. They gave me a different drug:  Thorazine. After the first one, and that horrible sensation of a mind that won’t stop in a body that won’t go, I hid each one under my tongue until I could spit it out. I couldn’t do that with the bedtime cup of chloral hydrate.  It burned my mouth and throat and I had to choke it down as the orderly watched.  I slept and had those chloral dreams every night and pretended to be zonked out all day.

Then I lucked out. At the weekly M&M (morbidity and mortality) conference, the shrink described my case and an allergist asked if he could consult. My back was gridded with the pin-pricks of tine tests and then I had to take about half of them again after the swelling went down because some of the reactions had been so extreme that they had obscured the results of the ones nearby. The list of allergies that had been causing my hay fever since infancy and then, after years of antihistamine treatment, switched from making my nose run to making my bronchii spasm, included mold, tobacco, black pepper, tree pollen, grass pollen, animal dander, house dust… and about ten other things. I started desensitization injections and was allowed to go home with a nebulizer to use when I couldn’t breathe.

When I got out of there, I was ready for some pleasure in my life. The stories I’d been hearing about that jungle warfare, and the emotions I’d been absorbing in that hospital ward, made me feel as if the world was ending. I talked to my husband, reasoned with him that it was only fair that he start staying home with P-Nut on alternate weekends so that I could go out with Earl. He agreed, on the condition he could have one night a week out with his girlfriend. I said it was fine with me, if we could continue our nights with the group of friends at the Airmen’s Club. He agreed, and went to the barracks to explain the arrangement to Earl.

When I had enough energy for it, I bicycled all over the hills and valleys around Fussa with that magnificent man. Other times, we stood crammed into the steam-driven trains to Tachikawa and Tokyo. We had glorious nights in quaint country inns and noisy city hotels, and I had my first, second, third… simultaneous orgasms ever. Admit it, people: they’re the best–you and your partner, coming together. With Earl, every orgasm was that way. Perfection.

Then a neighbor blew the whistle on us and the Air Force sent us back to the states after some military hearings and formalities. My husband was diagnosed as a sociopath and scheduled for a psychiatric discharge after we had returned to Travis AFB.

The infirmary at Yokota Air Base gave me my file to bring back with me, and three vials of the allergy serum to turn over to the flight attendants for refrigeration during the flight back to Travis AFB. The liquid in one vial was pale, straw-color, and that vial was not quite full. It was the one I’d been taking for a few weeks. When it was gone, my records clearly stated, I was to begin receiving the contents of the next vial, which was a light amber liquid, until it was gone. The second vial was 1,000 times more concentrated than the first. The third vial, also full, was dark amber in color and 1,000 times stronger than the second vial, a million times the concentration in the first vial.

I carried my serum and records from the plane directly to the infirmary in the terminal and handed them over, and sat down to wait for my allergy shot. A young lieutenant came in and injected me and the next thing I knew I was slumped, trembling and barely able to see, in a wheelchair in the corridor. I had been very lucky. When the doctor gave me a million times as much serum as I was prepared for, and I died, a senior master sergeant with years of combat experience was nearby. He gave me a shot of adrenaline to the heart muscle and brought me back… partway… to life. Got my heart beating again, anyway, but nothing else was working very well.

Nearby, in San Francisco, it was the Summer of Love. Sweltering in an upstairs apartment in Suisun, near Travis AFB, without an air conditioner, I had the worst FM/CFS flareup to date (still, of course, undiagnosed). I was in a fog, stumblin’ and fumblin’, 24/7. No one knew what was wrong with me, and I don’t think the doctors believed me when I said I hurt everywhere.

I was also in withdrawal from the barbiturates because each time I took one I would pass out, waking hours later to pain and lethargy. The nausea of withdrawal was better than the oblivion, but I still could not even manage to prepare meals for myself.

P-Nut spent a lot of time in the base nursery while his dad was occupied on base, first with administrative hearings and such, and then with processing out. My husband would get some take-out food at the end of the day, pick up P-Nut and come home to take care of me, until my mother-in-law came up from Escondido and took P-Nut home with her. That was the last time I saw my first-born son.

The story continues here.

Coyote Medicine is one of my names. Coyote shows us what not to do. Coyote was the original author of Murphy’s Law. He’s the Trickster who always trips himself up. If you don’t invite Coyote to the party, he’ll crash it anyway and bring chaos with him.

“Basket case” is the best phrase to describe where I was at, emotionally, around February of 1964. I didn’t know cat food from Karma, might not have ever heard anyone speak that word, “Karma”, at the time, but I had read about it in books.  I certainly knew the feeling of having one’s chickens or pigeons or bats or cats or cows come home to roost. Five years before, I’d tricked my mother into letting me marry Al, a sadist who brutalized me and our daughter. Then I’d let my fear of him drive me from the arms of the love of my life. To top that, I had allowed shame, and fear for my new baby’s future, to sway me, and I let my elders talk me into giving up Carol/Angie, the beautiful daughter that Larry has never seen (even to this day).

Then around the time I was out of it, those solitary sick weeks I lived on tea and ketchup soup, Bobbi and her husband had filed a petition with the court to have my parental rights vacated, so they could adopt my older daughter, Marie. I’d spoken to them on the phone, and to Marie each time I called, but they sprang the adoption on me out of the blue. 

I know Statch would have stiffened my spine, gotten me to court and supported me in the fight, if I’d had a chance to fight, and if he’d been there.  Made no difference anyhow.  Statch was dead, gone in a crash when we’d just started something that could quite accurately be called a love affair.  I was rudderless, and felt hopeless, but kept on working to try and get Marie back.

My mother and Carl came from California in February or March, primarily for the adoption hearing, I suppose, although nothing was said of it at the time.  She got the court to permit her to maintain contact with her granddaughter, but I didn’t learn of that for years. I was ordered by the court to abstain from contact with Marie and her guardians henceforth. When finally I learned of it, I didn’t fight it.  I didn’t know I had any right to legally contest the adoption after it had been finalized.

I had no fight left in me at the time, anyway. The hearing was over before I knew anything about it.  I was notified by mail that I wasn’t legally my daughter’s mother any more.  When I told Mama about it, unaware that she had been present at the hearing, she assured me  that I hadn’t a legal leg to stand on anyway, because of my failure to provide any child support while Marie was with Bobbi.

I let Marie go, and I focused on work and study. I had barely enough energy for two jobs, but I kept them both even after the reason for them was gone.   On Saturday, when the cafe was closed, before going to the night carhop job, I went to the library. The rest of my waking hours were spent on the bed in my tiny rented travel trailer with a book.

I had been reading J. Frank Dobie’s Tongues of the Monte and other folklore for years. I became entranced by the Coyote tales. That year, I also became fascinated by Aldous Huxley. I happened to find The Doors of Perception on a library shelf next to another book I was seeking (now forgotten) on a similar topic. It gave me a new point of view, some keys to open the doors of my mind. Then I read Brave New World and Island, which gave me some political depth and a conceptual framework from which to construct the rest of my education.

Then, an interesting man walked into my life. There was something about his eyes. We went on a date to a mid-town bar where airmen hung out. There was a poster behind the bar, a dissheveled, toothless old sot in a flight jacket, with the caption: “Sleep tight tonight, your Air Force is awake.” I remember dancing with that pudgy, balding (in his twenties) airman at that bar to I Want to Hold Your Hand, the first time I ever heard the Beatles.

We danced on our first date. I don’t remember if we kissed. We were both a little guarded with each other. He took me back to the trailer on the alley and the little social dance we did took us through a series of moves that I now recognize as a clear marker for some past-life karmic associations. We couldn’t take our eyes off each other, touching was something electric, and we scared each other spitless: extreme approach/avoidance. I knew it and I denied it.

I didn’t see him again for a while. This was the same time Mama and Carl were there. I was at work the night he came by, saw lights on, heard voices, and waited and smoked three cigarettes… waiting, I suppose, for my company to leave.  When the lights went out, he left.  Next day, I knew he had been there.  I saw footprints where someone had waited.  I saw cigarette butts of a new unpopular brand, Alpine, that I assumed were from the pack I’d given him the night of our date.

The cigarettes reveal something about my state of mind. This is worth a little side-trip. The surgeon general had just declared tobacco dangerous and mandated warning labels. I hadn’t ever smoked because each time as a child, all of three times when I took a drag on one of my father’s Camel straights, it had made me sick. But these things were advertised as extra mild and tasty, so I bought a pack. And I noticed myself putting those quarters in the machine, and knew I was trying to destroy myself. I tried to smoke. I took a drag or two on each of three different cigarettes over the course of a couple of days, and I coughed and I choked and then puked. Then I went out on a date and I asked this guy if he smoked. He said, “A little bit, sometimes, when I’m nervous.” So I gave him the rest of my one and only lifetime pack of smokes. It was just too horrible a way to die.

That night, of course, he had assumed I was in the trailer with some other guy. But he came back again in the daytime and met Mama and Carl and got it straightened out. We went out hill climbing on the beat-up old Yamaha 250 he had bought from someone on the base who was shipping out. Blew a valve or a gasket and had to walk it out to a phone and call for a ride. After that, I didn’t see him for a while, and I just holed up with my books in the little trailer beside my landlord’s garage.

I was there one warm spring day when he knocked at the door. When I let him in, he took me in his arms and kissed me.

We had trance sex, what my friend Cactus Lil calls Alpha sex… and I’m sure it edged over into Theta, too. I saw stars, and planets, comets and asteroids, in endless orbits, eternally. I think he liked it, too. We found an apartment near my job, moved in together and bought two ten-speed bicycles… wheels of our own. I got pregnant, and soon after that I began having asthma attacks for the first time in my life.

He paid for a lawyer to start the process of my divorce from Al. We moved from the apartment to a little house on a quiet street that ended right in front of our house, at the bank of a creek that wound around behind the house. Unwedded bliss: sleeping entwined at night, and riding bikes on weekends. I was out of a job again, after extended absences due to asthma and that other mysterious debilitating syndrome that came and went with no discernable pattern. The morning sickness and night heartburn of my pregnancy were just as distressful to my lover as they were to me. He missed a lot of sleep, what with me and his work. He was supporting us by moonlighting in a gas station in addition to his military duties.

To earn rank in the Air Force, he ordered USAFI correspondence courses so he might qualify as a “Super Crew Chief” on F-105s. The course materials were all at least Confidential, and some were Secret, and one course, after the others, was Top Secret. I wasn’t authorized to look at any of the materials.

I digested them all. I coached him. When he got to the Computerized Fire Control Systems he got out of his depth. I did the work for him. To express his appreciation, he ordered his next course for college credit, a series of five correspondence classes, in the field of my choice: intelligence. My favorite part of it was escape, evasion and survival. I think I have a gift for that.

I was about seven months pregnant and I was having nightmares about having the baby on the back of the motorcycle, so we bought a Nash Metropolitan. For the last 23 years, I’ve had a picture of me holding P-Nut as an infant, perched on the fender of that pink Metropolitan. It is my only picture of him. I had given that shot to my mother soon after it was taken, and she gave it back to me when I visited her in ’79. All my family pictures had been lost when I went to jail in ’69.

He was almost born in the Nash. All my live-born deliveries have been precipitate–less than three hours labor. They scare the OB nurses. When P-Nut’s younger brother Doug was born, Lydia, my OB/GYN, dropped the razor to catch him, and I evaded the pubic shave once again. Oops, wee digression there….

This baby was sickly, like me. I called him P-Nut because he almost always waited until I took off his diaper to pee, and he liked to pee in my face. Pretty presents for Mommie. My first-born son. Hostage to fortune. I got some more insight into my mother’s emotions toward me. With my girls, I’d never expected to lose them, and then they were gone. With P-Nut, I was continually afraid we were losing him. We both spent a lot of time at the base medical clinic. He was getting antibiotics and expectorants. I was getting tranquilizers at first and then barbiturates, antihistamines and asthma meds.

After my divorce was final, in the spring, when P-Nut was four months old, Mama and Carl babysat for us and we took a bus to Missouri and got married. When my husband was transferred to Japan about six months later, P-Nut and I moved to Halstead where Mama and Carl had found a place to live.

TO BE CONTINUED….