The lack of posts on the lounge over the last six odd months or so can be directly attributed to two things... the first of which started as something with the best of intentions, carried out with the same but not quite sure how it's landed, that was the revising and rewriting of the Veronica Chronicles in order to send them to the piece's namesake herself... the second of course was the death of a best friend, my brother, the brilliant Gulfboot Johnson... the first thing was a labor of love in the truest sense of the word, close to 80 pages and over 50,000 words in total i felt it was only right to get a copy of it to the person who was the main character and the muse behind the whole undertaking... the second thing felt like a sucker punch and thinking back to that day i still can't shake the sadness that my friend is gone... like i said before i still had things to tell him and now i won't get that chance...
What started as a beautiful conversation has come to an end in what might be described as an icy silence... having tracked down Veronica's number i did nothing with it for close to two years, it sat scribbled on a scrap of paper, tucked in with a bunch of other scraps in my wallet, no name necessary just ten digits, many of those mushroom midnights were spent pondering what she was doing and where she was, if she was happy? there were thoughts of texting but the logic was best not to be drifting through the psychedelic wilderness, it was something i needed to do with a level head and so when the opportunity finally presented itself, when things seem to align, i typed out a message, a message in which i thought about every word and what i wanted to say hoping that the meaning and intent wasn't lost in translation... then i hit send and waited... what ensued has been documented previously, an absolutely brilliant conversation and a surprising comment from Veronica about what would happen if we saw each other, a distinct possibility as by chance she was less than two hours from where i lived... but as usual things don't always go as planned and over the next few days that rush of blood to both our heads made things a bit more complicated than they needed to be, when she stated she didn't want to see me and that it was a bad idea (and truth be told she was most likely correct) the bruised ego (that i've been working on shedding) did not understand and so i lobbied, albeit unsuccessfully, for a few days before accepting the situation... luckily a friend of mine, a woman who had read the story, pointed out that maybe my contacting her, while a rush at first had also simultaneously opened up all the old wounds... and the fact is that never crossed my mind as of course i was thinking only of myself and how awesome it would be to see her while believing it would be the same for her.... but it wouldn't be...
This point would be driven home a month or so later when i got a late night text asking why she was always "the other woman and never the woman"... suddenly what my friend had said became crystal clear... i had opened old wounds, my contacting her now the catalyst for her looking back on things and wondering why now, twenty-five years later she was still alone while the man who didn't choose her sat in some nice suburban home, playing house dad while admitting he was in a sham of a relationship that had more to do with business than respect and love... (another very salient point was my friend pointing out to me that it seemed to her that Veronica would have had supported me, had my back, more than the BW ever did... Gulfboot himself in the months before he passed had stated he always thought V. was a better fit for me than the BW... and while they are both most likely correct the reality was what it was/is...)
And so i spent months on end retyping and revising in order to send her the story... she wanted a copy... and i wanted to oblige her... it took some time as i worked my way through it... the small font on the printout i was working from straining my eyes, revising and reworking, the fact i couldn't exactly do the work with anyone around as it's a story that most likely would land me in hot water... years ago, hell decades ago, the BW had rifled through my papers, we were living at the beach in a shitty apartment and on the cusp of going our separate ways, i was banging out poems and stories on an old manual typewriter and would leave the work in a folder to which one day she went through and read and pointed to a story about a man and his ex reconnecting... yes one could say it was "autobiographical fiction", one could say it was a violation of trust to read what i wrote uninvited or one could say i should have locked it away, doesn't matter but what was born from that was a conversation with the BW (years ago) about what i write and how and where i mine the ideas from and that not all of it was 100% true... what resulted from it was her then discounting my writing as a whole, in fact she's read nothing of what i've written in decades and has shown no interest even though she knows i still do it... that said, i wouldn't get an honest reading of it or opinion of it as she would mainly nitpick not about the quality or lack thereof but more about the subject matter... in fact the last time i was talking about it to someone and she had overheard her response was "i don't know who would want to read that sort of stuff..." it's easy to see how much love and support i get here at home and one will need a Sham-Wow to clean up the sarcasm dripping off that statement...
In an effort to get it done before i left for my favorite island i was getting up early and banging away at the keyboard in the early morning silence... once finished i re-read it, printed it out, had it bound at the local Office Depot, included a soundtrack page with the songs that accompanied the posts on the lounge, a thumb drive with some 25-30 albums on it (with many of the songs from the soundtrack), a book because in that first conversation she had asked me to recommend her a book, she then elaborated and stated not one i liked but one for her, so i put some thought into it and then went on to my favorite non-rainforest bookselling site and got a copy (The Dirty Havana Trilogy by Cuban writer Pedro Juan Guitterez) and a letter that apologized for any crossed wires, for the situation i had and then did create, and stating it was never my intention to restart anything i just wanted to see how she was and that ultimately i understood where things stood... not so much a goodbye but putting any sort of, for lack of a better word, romantic aspirations to bed, that we had experienced the 1.0 version 25 years before and then the 2.0 version 25 years later and that after all that we had come out the other side friends... or at least i think we did...
On returning to the States i did my usual... we walked in the door from the airport and i began doing laundry and putting things away from the trip... in the morning it was back to the usual grind in my role as the hired help, off to the grocery store, more laundry, cleaning, hanging with the cats and once i was caught up and settled in after a few days i sent her a text to see if she had read the story and what she thought of it... and nothing... i waited a few more days and sent another one... and nothing... when her birthday rolled around a few days ago i sent one more wishing her a happy birthday and asking if she had any thoughts she'd like to share about what i'd sent... once more, radio silence... i won't assume anything as to how she liked or despised what i sent, honestly i don't know how she feels about it but as my friend said, maybe she doesn't either, reading a story where you recognize yourself, seeing all those events play out, the intensity of those events and how they affected your life, getting into the mind of the other person involved and for the first time seeing what he really thought and how it once again brought back the hurt, the anger, the confusion of the whole situation and why it played out the way it did... or maybe in the end she thought, what a fucking coward, he never had the balls to follow his heart but instead only the money, only his mind... what she probably didn't realize was that unlike her, who came from a stable and loving family with parents married over fifty years, i came from a broken home where i saw my father duped and vowed never to end up like that, to keep my guard up so to speak... yet it's quite debatable how that worked out for me... then again it's not like i learned nothing from my mother...
So now i'll wait... as a writer when you send someone something to read you always want to get some feedback as to what they thought especially when one of the "characters" is based off that person... then again all those things above are valid... maybe it's nothing but a painful reminder of where her and i are both at and what could have been... but i can't worry about what could have been as i can only worry about the now... though i understand the sound i hear is the final nails sealing that coffin shut as the curtain comes down and the lights go up... is there a bit of sadness? absolutely... is there regret? no... was there joy? definitely... life is a beautiful thing that involves a gamut of emotions all of which should be experienced and this whole things has done just that... and maybe the melancholy that has sorta draped itself over the whole thing is more to do with the recognition that it's over... in the truest sense of the word... and that's okay too... as the esteemed Dan Bejar once sang, all good things must come to an end/ the bad ones just go on forever... and ain't that the truth...
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