October 14, 2002

• [note:  for Spot, Belinda and anyone else who found my
  terminology obscure, S.O.P. stands for "standard operating procedure."]

  1973

  Codependency was a word I’d never heard. But it was a condition I
  knew from the inside out. I had learned the foundation of it at my
  mother’s knee. She used to say that a woman isn’t complete without a
  man. She demonstrated her belief in that with a series of dysfunctional
  relationships after my father died.

  The Electra complex was a concept I did know. I understood that I
  had been set up to follow Electra by my father’s early death and the
  unusual circumstances of my infancy when he, not my mother, had been my
  primary caregiver. I was attached to my father, bonded beyond what’s
  normal. When none of my step-fathers bonded with me, I started looking
  for a replacement for him in boys my own age. I was driven by the
  perceived emotional need to be loved and protected.

  None of that had been conscious until I had started studying
  psychology in my late teens. By my late twenties, when I was living
  with Stony, I knew on an intellectual level that I was trying to fill
  an emotional void. However, my behavior was almost exclusively driven
  by my unconscious emotional needs. Insight into one’s own
  psychopathology can be interesting, but it does not necessarily lead to
  mental health. It is quite possible to be nuts and know it, and to go
  on being nuts. It’s not very good for one’s self-esteem.

  Prison, feminism, the Women’s Movement and a growing number of
  female friendships were more influential on my decision to break from
  Stony than any of my insights into my psychology. Until then, my
  relationships had overlapped. There had always been a new man waiting
  for me when I left the last one. All the time I was with Stony, I was
  married to Hulk, who was still in prison in Oregon.

  Stony’s sexual promiscuity, his general irresponsibility, and the
  brutal violence always threatening, ready to explode, were good solid
  reasons to leave. My women friends and even some of the men assured me
  that I deserved better than what I was getting from him. If another man
  had come along willing to rescue me from Stony, I’d have gone, I think.
  I don’t know, though, because there was powerful glue holding us
  together.

  Besides the sexual attraction, which was strong indeed, there was
  commitment. We had spoken of love and promised to stay together. There
  was also the bonding power of shared experience. Our travels together,
  running from the law, sharing the hardships of the road, his injuries
  and then our baby’s death, had tied us together.

  He didn’t want to let me go, and even though I wanted a better life,
  I was afraid of being alone. I wanted to believe his promises to
  reform. In order to get away, get out of that relationship, I had to
  fight his persuasive arguments and the promises that he would never
  hurt me again, would work and provide a home, blah, blah, blah. But
  only part of me was fighting. A significant part of my mind was only
  too willing to believe his pretty lies, lie back and spread my legs for
  some more reassurance.

  Meanwhile, life went on. Recovering from the physical stress and
  trauma of the extended pregnancy and the stillbirth was difficult. The
  remission of my autoimmune syndrome was over. I was in pain, weak,
  uncoordinated, not sleeping well. I tried to work, had a series of jobs
  each of which I lost when a day came that I simply could not handle the
  work. Stony lost job after job because of his drinking and his
  belligerent attitude, and we were always living hand-to-mouth,
  surviving largely on what we found in dumpsters.

  If there was no money for booze, he would find a way to get it. He
  borrowed money from every friend who would lend any. When he did not
  repay it, friends became enemies. Even though I had no part in the
  borrowing, I had to respond to many requests for repayment.

  One day when I was home alone wondering where Stony had spent the
  night and when he might show up, someone came over from the main house
  with a phone message. Stony was in jail. He had been swept up in a dope
  raid at the Gold Pan Saloon the night before. About a dozen people had
  been taken to the jail in Leadville. Some of them had been able to bail
  out, but five were still there needing rescue. That was not a simple
  matter.

  We had acquired an old International panel truck, 1950s vintage.
  Big, clunky, dented, loud and powerful, it would haul firewood and its
  tires were in reasonably good condition. It ran, but it smoked. It
  needed new piston rings. I had to clean the spark plugs before I could
  get it started that day. Even after that, it started hard and lacked
  pickup. But I took Zeke and another guy who had helped raise the bail
  money and we set out on the road to Leadville.

  On the one highest pass it was snowing hard. We kept passing cars
  that had lost traction and stopped in the road. The truck’s performance
  wasn’t great, but it kept running and kept rolling. Visibility was only
  a few feet beyond my front bumper. When I came up behind a snowplow
  spinning its wheels, I almost quit. But Zeke was chanting, “don’t stop,
  don’t stop, keep rolling….”

  With the motor barely idling and the wheels barely gripping, I
  pulled out around the plow and we went on plowing through the
  accumulated snow. We kept our rendezvous with the bail bondsman and got
  the five sad creatures out of jail.

  When Stony slid behind the wheel and tried to start the
  International, it fired a few times, sputtered but would not catch. We
  opened the hood and when I started pulling plug wires to take the plugs
  out and clean them, I saw that I had reversed two wires. Already being
  hailed as heroine by Zeke and my other passenger for getting us over
  the pass when the snowplows couldn’t make it, I had to take a bow for
  inadvertently screwing up the firing order.  If the engine had
  been running on all cylinders, it would have had more torque and our
  wheels probably would have spun out like everyone else’s.  On the
  way back, first time Stony lost traction and spun out, the other
  passengers insisted he let me drive again.

  That winter, hand-lettered signs went up all over Frisco,
  Breckenridge and Alma, announcing the Women’s Party. Not a political
  party, it was to be a get-together. If you were female, you were
  invited. Men were strongly admonished to stay away, warned of dire
  consequences. BYOB, potluck, it was held in a tiny two-room cabin down
  a long packed-snow path off a wide spot in the road where a bunch of
  cars and trucks were parked.

  Fortunately it was reasonably warm, because the crowd was much too
  large for the cabin. We circulated in and out, drinking everything from
  fruit punch and chamomile tea to homemade dandelion wine and Jose
  Cuervo Gold. Much conversation was made of the fact that more than half
  of us had brought cookies for the potluck. A large percentage of those
  cookies were green brownies.

  There was a lot of laughter, and some tears. A few women were
  nursing babies. Most of the others gathered around to ooh and aah over
  the babies, as did I. There were hugs all around and sympathy for my
  baby’s stillbirth. Many of us had not met before then, but that event
  turned a scattered and diffuse bunch of recent arrivals into a
  tight-knit community.

  One man was allowed in, briefly. When the party was in full swing,
  the photographer came down the path, took a few shots and was escorted
  out. We all signed the guest list, and each of us received a print of
  the group photo. Mine is some the worse for wear from its travels.

  

  That day was a rare relatively bright spot in that winter for me. I
  took my depression to the party and it came home with me afterward.
  Even when one has a beautiful healthy baby, post-partum depression is
  horrible. Mine was abysmal. Through it all, I felt disconnected from
  the merriment and made an effort not to let my foul mood show. My
  friends so earnestly wanted to cheer me up that I felt bad for feeling
  bad. I ate too much, drank too much, got overly loud and sloppy. I
  don’t think I wrecked the party, but I surely didn’t enhance it any.

  Around that same time, someone interesting showed up: the “real”
  Stony. When I met the man I was living with, that’s how he introduced
  himself to me: “Stony”. He had a regular name, not a bad name at all.
  He said his buddies in Viet Nam had given him the name Stony because of
  his prodigious feats of doping. The drug of choice, he said, had been
  O.J.s–joints laced with opium. He implied a well-earned reputation for
  getting stoned.

  Then a letter came from his old army buddy D.R. He was coming for a
  visit. With some embarrassment, to prepare me, my Stony told me that it
  hadn’t been his Nam buddies who named him Stony. This friend, D.R., had
  been called Stony. In tribute to that friend, he said, he had adopted
  the nickname. By then, I knew better than to express anything but mild
  interest in his story. Laughing at the man, or calling him a liar,
  would only make him mad. When he was mad, I was in danger.

  The original Stony showed up, and there was some confusion and
  embarrassment when I called my Stony by the only name I’d ever called
  him. With an uncomfortable “heh heh”, he explained to his old friend
  that he’d “picked up on” the nic.

  I think he treated his old friend rather shabbily. I gave him a cup
  of tea and there was some uneasy chitchat, then the guy left. I guess I
  can understand why Stony 2 wouldn’t want to take Stony 1 down and
  introduce him to the gang at the Gold Pan.

  Once when Stony was off somewhere and I was in the cabin alone, our
  friend John came in to talk to me. He owned the land and had first let
  us park our bus there and then had let us move into the little cabin.
  He said the arrangement wasn’t working out, and he wanted us to move
  out of the cabin and get the bus off his property. I didn’t understand.
  So he explained.

  He said Stony had appealed to him to take pity on me because of my
  pregnancy when he came to him and asked to use the cabin. Stony had
  promised to furnish it and build cabinets. I had scrounged some fruit
  crates, hung a few on the walls, and stacked the rest, for improvised
  storage space. This was not John’s idea of cabinetry. Additionally,
  there was a window Stony had broken in a drunken rage, which I had
  covered with cardboard, and there was a growing pile of trash needing
  to be carted away.

  I had naively thought that we had another free communal arrangement
  here and was shocked at John’s revelations. Stony flew into a rage when
  I told him. He tried to talk John into letting us stay, but we ended up
  getting someone to tow the bus to Alma, where we parked it behind a
  bar, beside the trailer where one of Stony’s new friends, the
  bartender, lived.

  In one of his most egregious bonehead moves, Stony traded our clunky
  but useful and reliable old panel truck for a red muscle car with bald
  tires. It was March and the roads weren’t slick all the time, but there
  was still occasional snow and ice. To make it worse, there was some
  problem about the title, like Stony had turned over the title to our
  International on the promise of a title to the gas guzzling ego trip. I
  kept reminding him to follow up and try to get the title and he kept
  saying he would.

  My one humorous (okay, it might be black humor, but I found it funny
  nonetheless) memory of that car was an incident that occurred one day
  in Breckenridge. We were with our friend Bill when we left the Gold Pan
  and walked several blocks up the mountainside to where we had parked
  the car. It had to be parked ‘way up on a hill, or else we’d need help
  pushing it to get it started. The starter was shot.

  It started okay, and we were rolling down the hill when Stony let
  out one of his horrendous farts. His digestion was shot from his
  drinking and other toxins, and malnutrition. His flatulence was
  legendary in frequency, volume and eye-watering potency.

  I was in the middle, Bill next to the door. He reached for the
  window crank, but there was none. He opened the door for a breath of
  fresh air, slipped, fell out of the car and broke his arm. I wasn’t the
  only one who found it funny. Soon Stony’s legend grew when the word got
  around that he’d broken Bill’s arm with a fart.

  Stony traded the sexy car to the owner of a gas station outside
  Frisco for a blue pickup truck. It was in that truck that I left him.
  I’d been talking about our splitting up for a while and he had decided
  to make it hard on me. Once he accepted the breakup, he expressed only
  anger and hatred toward me.

  I had no money. I wanted to keep the bus and stay in Alma in it,
  wanted Stony to take the truck and find himself another place to live.
  I felt I’d contributed at least as much to our mutual support as he had
  and wanted to split the possessions. He wouldn’t go for that.

  Still determined to get away from him, I had been sorting our things
  and packing. My plan was to ask Celeste or Annie or some other friends
  to let me stay with them until I got on my feet. Stony wasn’t having
  any of that either. He said if we broke up and I stayed there,
  especially if I moved in with any of our friends, I’d take his friends
  away from him. They would, he said, take sides against him.

  This conversation was taking place on a snowy morning in April,
  1973. In the weeks leading up to it, Stony had switched from drinking
  wine 24/7, to drinking Everclear. On several occasions when he was
  shitfaced he had attacked me, and my dog Angel had attacked him in
  turn. Stony was afraid of Angel and was losing control of me. In
  retrospect, I can see that he was decompensating, losing the sense of
  control so vital to him. He was grasping at straws, seeking whatever
  vestige of power over the situation he could find.

  We were still in bed, under the covers for warmth, on the mattress
  situated on a plywood platform at the rear of the bus. Under the bunk
  platform were some boxed clothes and books and such, things I intended
  to take with me. We were going around and around in a discussion that
  seemed to have no resolution. I was not going to do it the way he
  wanted, setting out on the road hitchhiking with only a backpack,
  leaving him with both bus and truck, leaving the town where I had
  friends and was part of a community.

  He was adamant. The bus was his, and so, according to him, were the
  town and our friends. He actually said, “This town’s not big enough for
  both of us.” I laughed, recalling any number of old western movies
  where a character had said that line. Instead of reacting with anger,
  he seemed to shrink. I pressed what I felt was a moment of advantage
  and said I’d go if I could have the truck. I was amazed when he agreed.
  It was something, a concession of sorts, but that wasn’t the end of the
  matter.

  He wasn’t going to let it be an easy departure. He went through
  every box I had packed. I had a shirt he liked to wear, and he insisted
  on keeping it. I’d had it before we’d met, but I let him have it. I
  argued for a while about Larousse Gastronomique and a few other
  cookbooks I had collected. But he had dug in his heels (he’s a Taurus)
  and wouldn’t let me take them. He admitted they were mine. He had never
  done any cooking. He insisted that he would need them after I left. I
  caved. It just wasn’t worth the hassle.

  Finally, he settled back in bed with his bottle and his dope stash
  and let me load my boxes and my bicycle and my dog into the truck. Then
  I started shoveling the foot and a half of new snow from the driveway
  so I could leave. The bartender and another passerby saw me shoveling
  and lent a hand. When I stuck my head in the door of the bus and said
  good-bye, Stony didn’t respond.

  I had about a quarter of a tank of gas in the truck and no money. I
  drove over Hoosier Pass and down the mule trail to Breckenridge. In the
  Gold Pan I said my goodbyes and begged spare change for gas. Zeke and a
  few others seemed genuinely sad to see me go. Zeke asked me to leave
  Angel with him. I thought about the road ahead and the very real
  possibility of going hungry again, and agreed. I knew from some lean
  times with both Ladybitch and Smoky how hard it is to explain economics
  to a hungry dog.

  With a full tank of gas and enough cash to fill it one more time and buy a burger, I pulled onto the highway, headed for Alaska.

  P.S. If you laughed at my fart joke, you will roll on the floor over at Greyfox’s Last Stand. 
  He blogged today, about shit.  I laughed, sprayed spit all over
  the monitor, laughed until my eyes watered and my cheeks ached.

  • 9:23 pm
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