Oh all right

Because Flip asked me to, here are the rules:

1. Open the nearest book to where you are sitting. Don't reach for anything cool or hip, make it truly the nearest book.

2. Open to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence. (The instructions don't say whether this should be the fifth complete sentence or the fifth including whatever incomplete sentence begins the page. You're on your own here. )

4. Post in your blog the 5th, 6th and 7th sentences, along with these instructions.

5. Upon completing this, enlightenment will be yours. Or at least somebody's.

This is what I got from the nearest book at hand:

Her father soon began to preach again to Anne about the necessity of being tough. "I know you feel like you can't handle going back to college after what you've been through", he would say "but you have to try. Giving up is absolutely the worst thing you could do."

Back to the Fourth

You know you must be getting close to the end of your Fourth Step when you are sitting with your hands on the keys going "Hmm, what else do I resent about my wife?" It's a good feeling. But it doesn't mean I'm done. And I want to be done so I can turn the whole thing upside down and get to the fun part where I start looking at my part in all the things I've been resenting. So here goes:

Finances. Mostly we just pay for everything out of our join account but my wife keeps the money she earns from her job in her own account and sometimes we use that money for taxes or investments or college tuition emergencies. She also uses it to pay for some of the stuff she'd rather not tell me she's spending money on until it's already in the house. The problem is that she doesn't ever balance her checkbook or look at her statements and so at any given time has only the vaguest notion of how much money is actually in her account. This often leads to the account being overdrawn. That's the not the resentment--I'm no genius organizer myself. This is the resentment: every time I suggest that she put Quicken on her computer to keep track of her money--or let me balance her checkbook--or hand it over to the person who comes in to do my bookkeeping a couple of times a month--she doesn't just say no. She goes ballistic. She makes it a big issue of control. Exhausting!

More finances. My wife isn't extravagant. But she just won't accept that the business we're both in has an ebb and flow and sometimes the belt has to be tightened. So she'll do impulsive (and undeniably endearing) things like buy two Panama hats, one for me and one for our son, at $500.00 each. You heard that right: a thousand dollars in straw hats sitting in the closet for going on two years now. She does it out of love. But she has to know that I'm not a hat guy. And then there's the lawn. We don't live in New England. It doesn't rain here very often. And there's a lot of shade. And there are pine needles. All of that makes for an intensely anti-lawn environment. So why, year after year, the hundreds and hundreds of dollars spent on trying to create a perfect carpet of green that will never be?

One more finances: Nobody needs a new car every three years. Nobody. That's the one true extravagance. We're coming up on the third year of the Prius soon. It's gorgeous. It's perfect. I'm bracing myself.

Caged animals: We have tons of pets and that's great but I only want ones that stick around by choice. And my wife loves birds. Loves them so much she wants to lock them up in little avian Auschwitzes and then listen to them shriek in the agony of imprisonment all day long. I keep telling her the unhappiness I feel having caged animals around should outweight the happiness she feels hearing them "sing" because God knows there is no shortage of cute little free-running animals around here to be amused and delighted by. (As I write this, Phoenix the Monkey-Cat is leaping from branch to branch of the tree outside my window making life hell for the pigeons.)

The high horse: My wife and I are both slobs. We've managed to pass for actual have-it-together adults for years--we give dinner parties and the guests don't see dirty clothes strewn randomly around the house--but the truth is we're both still oh-just-throw-it-anywhere grad students at heart. Every now and then, however, my wife will embark on an admirable War Against Chaos. The resentment comes in when she gets on the high horse and suddenly I'm the problem, if it weren't for me our house would look like a room at the Four Seasons right after the maid finished cleaning. All efforts to remind her that her own office (into which I never set foot) looks like something Katrina left behind are met with wild indignation. This sounds like a small thing. It should be a small thing. Maybe when I'm done with this process it will feel to me like a small thing.

The Cabin: friends of ours own a big piece of property in upstate New York that has on it a small cabin that was lying derelict for many years until my wife fixed it up (rather brilliantly, I might add) in exchange for getting to use it whenever we want. We go there a couple of times a year. All good. The problem is: when she refers to the cabin, it's always "My cabin." And when I'm there, when we are all alone together in a ridiculously romantic log cabin by the bend of a rushing stream in a dense forest of pine and birch, I am somehow made to feel like a guest. She won't even really allow that I actually love the place myself. And somehow the more I express my love for the place, and being there, the more uneasy and ridgy she gets. There's a lot of getting on the high horse about who's keeping the place clean and who's messing it up. We actually don't have a very good time when we're there. I've actually tried to talk to her about it. Which leads to the last resentment:

Unwillingness to Process. The cabin is just one example of this. There'll be a problem between us and I'll try to get her to sit down and talk it out and she'll say, very simply, "No." And that's it. It'll either work itself out or not.

And I'm going to make that the last of the resentments that I am carrying against my wife. Stay tuned for the other side of the story on every one of these points.

Philosophical. Right.

"Hey," I told myself (and the world): "I've had scripts not get made before. And I've had more than my share of scripts that did. It's all part of the game. The roller coaster. The theater of life. I can take it. No big deal."

So why was my wife holding me last night while I sobbed like an insane person for half an hour? The last time I cried that hard was six years ago when my 12 year old son (now the Bach-playing freshman in college) had been kicked out of middle school for pot for the second time and every other word out of his mouth was 'fuck you' and he was a little bursting ball of rage and we were trying to decide whether to send him away to one of Those Places. This movie not getting picked up didn't feel like it was anywhere near that league. But the fact is sometimes you can't write a script, you can't summon all the blood and passion it takes to actually get the thing down on the page, and not weave your heart into every page of it. There are scripts I've seen go away without a thought. So I should be glad that this wasn't one of them. Well, there I go, trying to be philosophical about the loss again. But last night as I whooped so loud I had to put my face in the pillow so I wouldn't freak out the neighbors, Aristotle I was not.

The good news about a big cry like that is that it does the job it's supposed to do. So now I can say, with a little more honesty, I hope: onward!

Back to Work

Back to the Fourth Step, back to the next script, back to buildling up to the next will-they-or-won't-they-make-the-damn thing, which should roll around in about the middle of March. Can I handle another round? You bet. Because that, after all, is what I signed on for.

I'm eager to finish up The Resentments. My relationship with my wife flickers between warm and wonderful and so clouded over on my side by all the angers and frustrations that I carry around... I am determined--sworn--to make this the year that I clear through the muck.

So: two last resentments having to do with sex, and then off that one for good. I'm going to roll them into one because even though the two incidents were three years apart they were really exactly the same scene played in different settings. Boiled down to essentials, the story goes like this:

We're staying in a wonderful comfortable hotel room in a cool place a thousand miles from home. The isolation, the change in the routine, the fantastic bathtub--all this combines to create a passionate sexual interlude. But more than that: it's all so wonderful that my wife is released into the kind of abandon she doesn't often allow herself--where she lets go and truly loses herself in the erotic/passionate/loving moment. Following this, I wake up thinking: this is amazing. This is what I've been dreaming of. We're getting to a new chapter here. And in both cases--June 2001 in Idaho and August 2004 in Utah--something happens in my wife's brain and within hours she picks a fight over something insanely trivial--being left in the car in the sun for too long while I made a phone call in one case (I will go to my grave swearing that the car was in the shade), and in the other I can honestly not remember the cause of the freak-out (and probably should). In both cases, she goes off on a tangent of anger and irritability that all my entreaties for forgiveness or rationality or discussion will not penetrate, and entirely wrecks the moment. In one case I brought it to therapy, we went over and over it, but she wouldn't allow even the slightest possibility that she had overreacted or made dark where there had been light.

I'm very glad that those two are out and written down and hopefully on their way out of the place they hold in my consciousness.

Hearth and Home

They're not making the movie. Since I was paid to do it I don't own it but the rights come back to me at the end of '06 and then--we'll see!

Here's a hideous little low-consciousness crime I could only confess to in an anonymous blog: I've been on the other side of this many times, and every time part of the pleasure was getting to gloat over all the other writers who didn't make the cut. So I'll take at least a part of being on the wrong side of it this time as a well deserved nyah nyah nyah.

I found out yesterday evening, kind of glomped around feeling like I had a flu coming on, which I did, took a lethal dose of zinc and Emergen-C and a 1 milligram clonopin (my wife counseled 2, but I resisted) and went to bed. Then today was more glomping around and finally a really long goodbye-cruel-world nap.

When I woke up the house was filled with voices and music. My son had come home from college with his girlfriend, they were playing the piano and singing and horsing around, and I went downstairs, and my wife had made buckwheat with bowtie pasta, an intensely nostalgic comfort food of my childhood, and brussels sprouts with lemon, parmesan and olive oil, a dish we've perfected in the course of our marriage, and the kitchen was warm, and I got hugs and kisses and hot dinner, and my son (who several years ago seemed headed for the life of a street junkie) was playing the new Bach he is learning on the piano, and everybody was talking at the same time, and I gave my wife a foot massage, and things seemed just about as good as they could be.

Serenity Revisited

Still no word.

I breathe in, I breathe out.

Serenity

Forget it: no way to pretend I'm not thinking about IT every second. The latest word is that in the slate of pictures they are picking up there is one more open slot and mine is in consideration for it. They have some questions about the "tone." Possibly today I will have an opportunity to answer some of those questions. Or not. So I thought I would look at a picture I took last year at a particularly serene moment in an astonisingtly beautiful place and try to think about nothing except the smell of the jungle and the sound of the waves and warm golden sand under my feet. Click on it for a bigger view, and join me.

That Was A Drill

Hollywood will get you coming and get youg going. Yesterday was characterized by a magisterial silence. Now, I'm told, today is the day. Sorry: already used up the adrenaline. The signs, btw, are less than great. Therefore: onward! The good news about things like this is it distracts you the problems in your personal life. No, stated more positively, and more truthfully: it makes you savor the wonders in your personal life.

Today is Probably the Day

Today I find out whether my movie gets made or not. Thumbs up or down. Onward to casting, hiring, shooting, the whole awesome rush. Or back to working on current projects and building up future ones. Not life and death, but--it's been a pretty damn tense week, waiting to hear. To understand this you have to know what making a movie is like. You go into a golden bubble where suddenly you are a little god making manifest in the physical world a universe that was previously in your head--hundreds of extremely talented people running around trying to get it just the way want it. Sometimes on sets watching actors saying my lines I have floated up from the ground, weightless, at the joy of it. Sometimes on sets the actors are screwing up, the light is fading, the scene isn't playing the way I wanted it to, various producers and assistant directors are telling me that if I don't get this shot right now I most certainly won't ever get to the next scene, it seems that my entire career is resting on whether or not camera and actors accurately arrive together at their appointed meeting place, in short--hell. But it's still an awesome high. So: for the last week we've been hearing that the buzz is good, we're in the running, and--the decision either way will come down today. I've been in this long enough to know that I'll be okay either way, that I've had it go both ways, and that there's lots of work to get back to.

But I want them to say yes.

Old News

Another resentment now, and one that I really have let go of long ago. I include it now only because what I have never done is examine my own part in this event--how I contributed to it and made it possible. But that's column for in the 4th step, so I need to do columns 2 and 3 to get there. So here goes:

My son, who came into the world so happy and sunny a kid that we nicknamed him Felix--happy--almost as soon as he was born, began to show signs of real trouble at about age six. Moodiness, rages, sometimes begging us to buy him a toy "to cheer me up:" in short, a proto-addict. We took him to every kind of warm-hearted humanistic new age therapist we could fine, and a couple of standard therapist, and got all kinds of advice, but he just got angrier and more difficult and finally one night, when a variety of circumstances came together, my wife hauled off and whalloped him across the face so hard it left a red mark that had the Department of Childrens Services and the police at our doorstep the next day. When the situation was investigated the authorities pointed us in the direction of family counseling and left it at that--they saw how we'd been pushed to the edge by a situation we couldn't understand or control. She hit him a couple of more times after that, after which, God bless her, she sought her own help and started taking anti-depressants and nothing like that every happened again. Okay: that's that story of that resentment. What really counts her is: when I get to column four, a couple of posts from now, I'll look at the ways in which I, Mr. Innocent, Mr, she's-the-one-who-lost-her-temper, am actually not so blameless in that situation.

To end on a happy note--my wife and son spent many years working this out, as my son went literally to hell and back--including two years at an emotional growth boarding school (read: reform school) along the way--and he's now 18 a freshman in college and doing beautifully and they have a wonderful close relationship.

It's The Weirdest Thing

Since I've started writing down these resentments there's been a change in the molecular structure of the air in the house. Like it's--warmer. Between my wife and me. Like we're on some kind of holiday together. Since I don't believe in telepathy or magic, it must be something in me, in my attitude, that's happened because I'm putting this stuff down, or more likely simply because I've focused my commitment to positive change. And I've only just started. I love the 12 Steps.

Three Resentments

I'm titling it that optimistically. I want to get through three tonight and I want to get through them more succinctly this time.

So, Resentment the Second:

1985. We were camping in the mountains with our daughter, aged 2 1/2 at the time. I had gone off on a hike of my own and discovered an astounding spot where a rough-hewn wooden footbridge crossed a stream at a point where there was a clear emerald pool, a waterfall, great big mossy boulders and a grove of massive ancient Giant Sequoias. A place you'd go half way around the world for if you saw it in a picture. I wanted my wife to see it and I wanted to swim in the pool which I didn't feel entirely comfortable doing without anybody there, as the rocks around it were steep and slippery. She's not big on hiking--she likes to hang out in camp, cook dinner, putter around making things nice, which makes for very good division of labor on camping trips--but on our last day I convinced her to take the very easy, almost level one mile stroll down to the spot. She got into a worse and worse mood as we went and when we got to this God's-own-handiwork place she crossed her arms and said she had no idea what she was going to do down here while I went swimming and why did I drag her to this ugly boring place. So I took a quick swim and we walked back and had a fight in the car that was so bad--I trying to get her to cop to how unreasonable and intransigent she was being--that our daughter started crying, hard, and we had to pull over and comfort her. To this day I don't know quite what brought it on, except she REALLY doesn't like being cornered into doing stuff she doesn't want to do, and somehow or other I had done that. Actually now, 21 years later, this no longer makes he steam with rage, thank God, but for a very long time it did.

Resentment the Third:

Oh what the hell, let's jump to a big and complicated one. In the first years of our relationship, from when we first slept together on Christmas night '73 until around the time our first kid was born, in '82, we had an extremely plentiful and easygoing sex life. We would basically just have sex all the time. I remember some adult she was working with while we were living together in summer '74 was bragging how she and her boyfriend had sex three times a week and my then-girlfriend now-wife and I felt pretty smug and happy hearing that because we were doing it four times a day pretty much every day, and sometimes in semi-public places if the mood took us. This eased off some but for a long time it never occured to me that there could be such a thing as wanting sex with her and not freely and happily having it. I slept with a few other women during this time but the relationships were brief so I never got a chance to see that it could be otherwise. We were using IUD as contraceptive at the time and in 1980 there was all the talk about the dangers of IUD's and her attitude was oh forget it, the IUD is fine, but I was thinking ahead to having children with this woman (there was the possibility of infertility) and I talked her into removing it and switching to the diaphragm. Our sex life never entirely recovered, except briefly during the first pregnancy, when the fear of pregnancy obviously wasn't an issue, and then it got really bad for a long while and the resentment here is this: as I became increasingly unhappy with her decreasing sex drive, or distaste for condoms and diaphragms, or whatever it was, she would never talk about it, she would never see it as a problem we were having: I was alone with it. I tried to open the discussion many times but she wouldn't talk about it or what we could do about it. We went to therapy for it twice (read: I dragged her to therapy for it twice) and both times she walked out the of therapy early on, once actually walking out right in the middle of a session we were having. I resent that she made it my problem and not ours. I would date this resentment to 1985 when she walked out of the first therapy and 2001 when she walked out of the second.

Resentment the Fourth:

Maybe this is part of Resentment the Third but I'll break it out separately anyway: Even now, when there is warmth and fluidity back in our physical relationship, many of the things I like to do most sexually I almost never get to do. She rarely like her breasts touched. She won't let me go down on her. Basically foreplay consists of back rubs and kisses on the neck, which she claims to be entirely satisfied with, but she doesn't like to be kissed on the lips in bed--okay in the shower, or hanging out in the kitchen, but in bed she feels smothered. Many a therapist I have brought this up with, including one we saw together, immediately asked whether she had been sexually abused--common cause of that distaste for direct stimulation. Well, depends who you ask. When she was age 10-12 her brother, six years older, used to con her/bamboozle her/bribe her/wheelde her her into giving him hand jobs. If you ask me, that's abuse. If you ask her, it's perfectly normal between siblings. (If anybody wants to weigh in on this, by all means I'd love to hear it!) Whatever the reason for her reluctance to be touched directly in a sexual way except in the act of actual intercourse, she won't deal with it, and I'm left having to build circuits of satisfaction out of the contact we do have. The big twist on this is that occasionally she will suddenly REALLY want her breasts touched--we're talking once in a year and half--and that used to be an amazingly wonderful thing for me but now there's so much pressure around it--this is it! I better enjoy it!--that the sexual energy starts to run backward instead of forward and I'm actually almost happier in the lower-key norm. To sum up, the resentment is: I'm left alone with this, it's my problem, not ours.

As I write all this I'm eager to jump to column four, where I lay out my part in all this, and focus on my own faults, but I'll do this the way my sponsor tells me and do the whole second column before I move on.

Resentment the First

It seems crazy to start a journey of building more and better closeness with someone by listing the things you resent about them, but I believe in the genius of The 12 Steps, so here goes:

1983. My daughter is barely one year old. I've been working insane hours for very little money, the baby makes for crazy sleep hours, we're broke, and my wife has basically stopped having sex with me. Her mother (whom I love and who remains to this day one of my best friends) is staying at a really nice rural spa an hour and a half out of the city and reserves a cabin for us for the weekend, on her nickel. Well, her rich married boyfriend's nickel, but that's another story. It's a chance to go away, catch a breath, be together, and maybe even make love. Or that, anyway, was my intense fantasy. Now I should say that my wife has a way of getting extremely and unassailably pissy--she'll work herself into a bad mood that there is simply no assuaging; the only way to deal with it, as I finally learned after two decades or so, was to go away and wait for it to pass--and pass it would, like it never happened. Will somebody please go back and tell that to the me of 1983 and save me years and years of grief? Okay, okay, let's get to the resentment. We set out on a Friday evening to drive out to the spa. There is some testy discussion as to the proper route to take. I happen to know exactly how to get there, and I say so, but my wife takes great pride in not being given directions and says no, we don't take highway X, we take highway Y. I try to convince her, logically pointing out simple facts about the nature of north and west, but she argues and I am so tired of the general atmosphere of pissiness and how relentlessly self convinced she is in moments like these that I say: okay. It's highway Y. And then I sit back in my seat while she heads north on Y, taking us farther and farther away from the correct route to the spa with every revolution of the wheels. After two hours, two hours of me sitting silently and waiting for the inevitable to come down, she realizes that we are on a fast road to nowhere and angrily pulls over to the side of the road. This is long before cell phones. This means finding a payphone and finding the number of the spa and waking up the night receptionist who has to somehow give us directions to the spa which involve crossing a very dark mountain range on barely paved roads. My wife just gets madder and madder as it gets later and later, and why? Because I sat there and said nothing while we were going the wrong way. "But honey, I tried to tell you that we should have--" Useless. Not a cat's chance in hell of getting through. I was the bad guy, and I was the bad guy all weekend, and affection and closeness were the last things in the universe that were going to happen, let alone sex. That was the closest in all the years we've been together that I've ever come to leaving her. I even told her mother that the next morning, on a hike. Mercifully it was all 23 years ago.

Okay. It's late and I'll do more resentments tomorrow. But I can't end with that. I need to end with something to clean the air. An opposite memory. Here's one: 1976. I'm in grad school, and have a summer job in Paris. She comes to visit me. We have our own tiny apartment. One warm evening we walk through the streets hand in hand singing the two parts of a Bach two-part invention, in counterpoint. She's a real musician and I'm just a music lover but she never gets the least bit impatient as she helps me through my part, and there we walk through the streets of Paris, holding hands, singing Bach at the top of our lungs, and we're twenty three years old, and there's just us, and we are very very happy.

How this works

The way my Al-Anon sponsor is having me do the four step is in the classic four-column method as laid out in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the first column you list the people who are important to you in your life, or against whom you are carrying any kind of resentment. In the second column you list all the resentments you have against each of those people. In the third column you put how the cause of the resentment hurt or affected you. In the fourth column you identify your own part in it--your own character defect. In my first column I have over a hundred names and have done the second column on seven or eight of them. I was going in chronological order but decided to jump ahead to my wife because she is so much topic number one for me these days. Kids are out of the house, we're starting a new chapter of our lives, we've never gotten along better, daily wrangling is a distant memory, we are getting great joy out of doing all the things to our house that we have dreamed of for years, and now is the time to take all the self-defeating brain-garbage out of my side of that relationship and make it everything it can be. So how better to start? By listing all the things that she has done through the years--the 33 and a half years, but who's counting--that have driven me COMPLETELY INSANE. This is tough because I want to be thinking about all the things I love about her but I know I have to do this step right now.

Trauma

I have a little less than an hour before The Shield--yes I've got TiVo but I still love that mass group experience of feeling like I'm watching it with the rest of America, so--I'll pick up the narrative where I left off. Fast forward a little: an extremely rough crossing to loss of virginity--such a weight of fear and shame and we won't, in this forum, trace that back to parentage or playground bullies or anything else. Forward only! Spring of senior year, saw this Botticelli-angel freshman girl doing a scene in drama and thought: her. Not too many weeks later we had the borrowed apartment from a friends whose parents were out of town, the contraception (foam, of all things: this is 1971 we're talking about) and a whole night all our own. All around us, though, the circle of drama department friends were certain that I'd have "trouble." And said so! Amazing. We got into bed, the Botticeli angel was terrified, I promised we'd go slow, and I, amazingly, was instantly and intensely turned on and thought: trouble? Ha! But her terror didn't go away. She was just shivering shivering scared and much kissing and holding didn't help much. Finally it got really late and she said okay let's just do it. But the deal, she said, was that I had to go in the bathroom while she put the foam in, which I did. There I stood in the dark surrounded by my friend's mom's perfumes and hand creams until her little voice came from the other room saying "Okay you can come back." I came back and she was lying stiffly in bed, shivering, all mine for the taking, with the faint odor of contraceptive foam hanging in the air. All trace of lust was gone. Then after a while the sun came up and we went to school and I didn't have the guts to get naked with a girl for two years. Because I had been--and I didn't realize the degree and truth of this until recently--traumatized. All those fears which I knew in my heart were unfounded turned out to have been stone cold real after all. Let's fast forward through those two years, okay? I got into my first choice impossibly fancy college and went away and was just plain miserable all the time. I made a pact with myself that I would either get over my fears and have a romance by the time I was 25 or I would kill myself, and I believe I may actually have done that. But: there was healing during that time. The healing of staying out of the game and going to Reichian therapy and learning the art of romanticized depression: oh the suffering artist. There are worse forms of depression. Finally the summer of my freshman year at college three thousand miles from home I was introduced, by our mutual karate instructor, to the girlfriend of a reasonably close friend of mine. The shape of her face and body fit right into an outline that had always been there in my head and by her own report she felt the same way. We both immediately said "Oh, we've met", then spent the next half hour trying to figure out where, while her boyfriend fumed silently, fully sensing what was going to happen. What happened is that he went six thousand miles away to study his martial arts, with big championships (never attained) in mind, I waited a decent two weeks and then called her. She became fairly central to my life right away--I would spend every minute with her when I was home from college, which was three thousand miles away--but all that insecurity about sex I was carrying around was a problem for a long time. It was an unusual fear, manifest in fiery makeout sessions, blazing erections, and a terror that if we went one step toward IT it would be that night in senior year all over again, all the fire would go away and I'd be sentenced to another two years or more of hell and suicide at 25. But it turned out all that fear was nothing a few milligrams of quaaludes one windy winter night couldn't take care of. Methqualone or however it is spelled melted that short circuit of fear right out of my head, we had a very long night of unending (and I think unprotected) sex, and so began a passionate, sometimes tumultuous, sometimes terrible, sometimes peaceful and joyous relationship with the woman I have now been married to for 24 years. The morning after the quaalude night I walked back to my parents' house, about three miles, and it was a beautiful warm morning, flowers were blooming in every garden, three friendly dogs followed me the whole way, sprinklers were sending rainbows over lawns, and the entire world was absolutely perfect.

Okay, that's the backstory, or most of it. Fourth Step begins in next posting.

The Fourth Step, part one: SISSY

I am working a 12 step program right now and have been stuck on my 4th step--my fearless moral inventory--for a long time. But I've started to gain some steam lately, and I thought I would do the big 4th step--the one on my wife--on this blog. This being the big truth blog. Some background is required:

The program is Al-Anon, but it's not my wife who got me into it, it's my son, who had big drug problems in mid-adolescence. He's doing great now, a freshman in college, loving it, great relationships, great girlfriend, sober and hard working. A great deal to thank God about there.

Which leaves me, after years of dealing with him, left to have to deal with me. And my relationship with my wife.

A little more back story.

You all knew the sissy in elementary school. That was me. Don't know how I stepped into that role, but I was the sissy right out of central casting. Picked last for all sports. Delicate in mannerism. Effeminate in speech. Even now when I listen to tape recordings of myself from back then (we loved to do tape recorded shows on my dad's big old reel-to-reel Webcor) I get sick at what a sissy I sound like. No wonder the kids wanted to gang up and stone me on the playground: I was The Other! Fairy was the word used at the time. Or just plain Girl. But there was a switch. I wasn't actually homosexual. That crush on Martha Silver that I had the first year at summer camp and that filled me with longing for her all year long--while I was being called fairy by one and all-- was real. When I held hands with Elaine Rosenstein walking out of the woods at the next summer at summer camp--Martha was second fiddle that year--I had to turn kind of sideways so she wouldn't see the lump in my swimtrunks, and that was real too. But back in the real world I was four years behind and there were no girls who would go any where near holding my hand. Or at least I didn't have the courage to reach out and try. There were kids, both boys and girls, who were extremely cruel and said really terrible things to me and I remember their names and sometimes I Google them and not one of them has left the slightest ripple on the cyber sphere and when I compare that with my 30 plus pages of entries (I write for movies and television and that leaves a lot of tracks) I feel really good inside. All of this brought me to adolescence with a concrete mixer truck of insecurities sitting on my head. What girl would ever make out with me? If one wanted to, would I have the guts to make the move? And as I got closer to the age at which virginity started to really be on the line, there was: how do I know I'll be able to, you know, DO it? In high school I got into drama, got leads in plays, got fantastic grades in all my classes, got elected president of my class, went from outcast
to big man on campus, was surrounded by girls ready to kiss and be kissed--but I was still all bound up in sissyhood in my heart and three days of therapy a week every day of the year did nothing to help because I was afraid to open my mouth and express any one of my fears. I think that at that point I would rather have been shot in the head than say the word "masturbate" out loud. Because I was afraid that those cruel kids were right. That I was a fairy, doomed to be a fairy, would never be anything but a fairy. You know what? This is really hard because I'm feeling it all right now, the depression and fear and doubt and shame. Signing off for tonight. More to come.