October 25, 2002

• Anchoring Down in Anchorage

  Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

  I’m getting defensive here, or offensive, or both; thought I should warn you.  That last cliffhanger earned some comment, but I had a good reason for it.  My entering Anchorage for the first time was a logical break point in the story.  And I hope you will eventually see why this is the logical place to do this retrospective of my relationship with Stony, before moving on into the Anchoraguan $$ Vortex.  It will all come clear in the end, one hopes.

  I cheated in writing the section of the memoir since my release from prison.  I focused everywhere but on Stony, probably only because he was my only focus most of the time while we were together.  He burned at a high heat, demanded and drew attention everywhere all the time.  Mere days after we met, I almost went off with his traveling companion, but Stony’s charisma swayed my choice.  The other man might have been another of those Grand Cosmic Payoff Soulmate relationships–it certainly felt like it at the time, but so, too, did Stony… the realization of all my girlish dreams, a man who could keep up with me in the sack.

  Heavy in the earth sign influences in both of our charts, we supported and nurtured each other and beat each other up.  Bed games alternated with and turned into mind games and back again.  It was a time of mind games:  psychedelic experiences, Ouija boards, Tarot cards, I Ching and PK.  Our friends included serious and semi-serious radical revolutionary “families” such as STP and Assholes, and itinerant con men and thugs such as the Nomad Builders, a convoy of bus bums who followed construction booms and liked to settle disputes in a sweat lodge with a few quarts of Jack Daniel’s black label.  I saw too much blood those days, bandaged too many wounds.

  After he had gotten out of jail and found me in Morro Bay, there was a sunset walk on the beach when I spilled my guts to him, told him how scary it was watching him drink himself to death.  It was a feeble attempt to convince him to get on down the road without me, but it didn’t work.  He convinced me that he needed me to help him kick the booze and redeem his life.  We had a beautiful codependent relationship revolving around a complex set of separate and mutual addictions, addicted, for a while, to each other.  Later on, sitting on a sunbaked rock by a crystal creek in Colorado, he told me how sick it made him to see how he was turning me paranoid and jaded, untrusting… old.  But he had the devil of a time letting go.

  He was both incredibly beautiful, and screamingly funny-looking.  As in all of my best relationships, our senses of humor played off each other well, with a twist.  When we met, he was already on a downward spiral, scarred from brawls and crashes, bent in mind and body.  He had lost his upper front teeth in a fight, and had bridgework the army had given him.  He puked out the bridge in a bar in Denver, flushed it, and was gap-toothed still, the last time I saw him.

  Drafted out of high school, already addicted to alcohol, Stony got into opiates and weed in Southeast Asia.  He said that on acid and opium joints he “almost” fragged his lieutenant, but instead just punched him out.  Then he ran out onto the flight line and stole the Huey that was warming up on the pad.  He was in Hue during the Tet offensive, he said.  He had many war stories.  Most of the guys I knew had war stories.  Pardon me guys, but I’m sick of war stories.  I started tuning them out.

  When we talked among our friends in Colorado about wanting to move to Alaska, we had a lot of company.  Whether it was for the promise of well-paid jobs building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, or to participate in the planned environmental protests against the pipeline, just about everyone we knew around Breckenridge or Boulder wanted to come to Alaska.  Of course, the better they had it there, with work, family, home, money, etc., the less likely they were to make the move.  I had nothing to keep me in the Lower 48, and unlike most of those others, I actually knew someone in Alaska.  Impelled out of the Rockies separately and then crossing the Gulf of Alaska together, by the time we got to Anchorage, Stony and I were more traveling companions than lovers.

  Toward the end, it got so I knew just where the conversation or argument would escalate into a beating and didn’t let it deter me.  I came to understand that the issue was simply control, “respect” (actually deference, that he demanded and I didn’t deliver), and that he wasn’t out to kill me, but to enforce compliance.  His memories of the blowups, when he did remember, were humiliating to him.  He was not only failing to control me, but wasn’t controlling himself, either.  Sober, he was filled with remorse for all his drunken foul-ups.  For him, there wasn’t much attraction in sobriety but he struggled at it sporadically out of a feeling that it was the right thing to do.

  I didn’t just sit still and let him beat me, but in my efforts to defend myself, I got some painful lessons.  There were times when any resistance enraged him more and he hurt me worse.  Other times, if I struck back, he would fold up, drop to the floor and cower with his arms over his head.  I think sometimes he regressed to his childhood responses to parental abuse.  After the swimming party incident, when I grasped the cast-encased broken arm he was beating me with and hit him in the face with it and he backed down, I was emboldened to fight back.  Sometimes it helped, sometimes it made things worse.  Which it would be was always unpredictable.

  I was becoming weary of the dance.  I hated catching sight of myself with a fat lip or black eye.  Sometimes I avoided public places because of the bruises, which was just how he wanted it, with me isolated.  Having left him once, when we got to Anchorage, it was just a matter of time until I’d leave him again.

  Continued….

  • 1:20 pm
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