Automaton (Jim)
Automaton 12/23/2005
I was collapsing in on myself, after my fathers death and the final break off with Ty. I was getting very anxious, having a hard time doing the simplest things. I couldn’t face the world, but this time I couldn’t simply hide away from it either. The world would not go away that easily this time, till I was ready to come back. I had clients, and a job that I’d have to call each day to make my excuse, and three days away would require a note from a doctor. Besides I’d be called here at the house.
This had happened once before, when it finally sank in that it was over with Bobby, the artist I’d been with when I first came to Atlanta. When nothing I could do would change that, it hit bedrock. I had pulled away from Bobby first, about a year before the end. It had happened when I went home, that all my romantic feelings evaporated, no matter that I’d brought him with me, for the very purpose of bridging that very disconnect. I actually got sick, supposably from food poisoning from a sealed apple juice drink, so that I threw up beginning about an hour from home, every half hour, for three days. He flew back after two days. After that, the distance and emptiness between us grew and grew.
In the end I had known he was seeing some guy from his gym. So it was mutual that we’d separate. But a month after that, I knew I’d pushed him away, not intentionally, but had just the same. It wasn’t a far push though, given his inherent detachment though. But now I knew I loved him absolutely and would do anything to get him back. Anything!
I wasn’t confusing him with perfection, though. In fact, he was a lousy lover. He’d resent his way into it, do it quickly, and then refuse to touch or talk afterwards. And I loved his art but it’d consume him. For three weeks or a month, he’d paint on it night and day. Nothing else existed when it had a hold of him. And when it was done, and beautiful, and moving, and perfect, he’d start another. He was a quiet, insular guy. He could be an asshole too. He’d told my Mom seeing Illinois in winter, was to see death, an utterly depressing place, where even the firs turned rust brown. It looked to him like the day after a nuclear holocaust, devoid of life. So true but how callous.
But after he was away a month, the spell of going home was finally broken, and my feelings were back. I wept. I really, really loved him, faults and all. How could those feelings have been lost at home?
I’ve always had the ability to turn completely cold, where my feelings were gone, where I could erase my Dad, so that he no longer could touch me, where he no longer existed. In computers detachment was handy. In a crisis I was an automaton, unhampered by care, urgency, regret or fear. The sheer opposite of collapsed in on myself, where emotions and feeling had devastated me, and laid me to waste, where I couldn’t go on. Untouchable, I was unassailable.
So there were advantages to being an automaton. I was efficient, things ran as they should, money was plentiful. Circumstances, consequences, hopes, disappointments, were so irrelevant they were forgotten. In fact each night I did a complete reset of the hard-drive within me, back to the pristine way it had come from the factory originally. All the wear on me from the day, where anyone or anything had gotten in, was erased. I slept like a happy Australian. No concerns, mate. It might make me sick going back home, to be snapped back into the way I’d learned to survive where a person could not, but snap back I did anyhow. And my life was instantly back on track, reset, regardless of how I wanted it, or felt. Hell, that was the beauty of it, I no longer felt or willed.
Maybe some of Bobby’s detachment in his art and as a lover came from home too. I’d first gone to his place, years before, for Christmas. We’d come in in the middle of the night, about 2 AM. It was snowing and cold, on their ranch, about an hour south of Nashville. Bobby jumped down out of the big farm Silverado, he’d bought from his father. It fit some past him and yet didn’t fit a suave interior architect in Atlanta. Looking out my door then I saw a part Rottweiler, part St. Bernard, Cujo, with a head the size of a bear. I hauled Bobby’s ass back in the truck until he’d told Cujo three times that I was not to be eaten.
Cujo never took his eyes off me the whole three days we were there. The first day he would stay between two and four feet from me, staring unflinchingly at me at all times. Day two, he’d stay in the same room, perhaps slightly aside of me. Day three he’d be in earshot of me. I was on a short leash.
When we came in that first night, Bobby had tucked me in his old bed, and giving me a kiss and Cujo a pat, he then slipped down the hall, in the dark, to sleep on a bench in the laundry room. As I got up to pee, feeling my way to my door and out into the hall, a big set of arms suddenly embraced me, and lips kissed me on the neck, saying ‘Welcome home son.’
Three days later, as we left, I said to Bobby, ‘I’ve never been more confused in my life.’ One moment your father clearly likes me, where he’s proudly showing me his race-horses, and the next I’m sure he’s going to kill me outright. What was going on with him, I asked? Bobby said, ‘I did amazingly well.’ I was the first guy friend he’d had to the ranch since he was 12, that his father hadn’t physically thrown off. I’m sure I had deeply confused the poor old guy, since I was in deep, deep hiding, even from myself. Lucky for me, since he was just the type to literally have killed me, had he known.
So with my burning desire, I had managed to get invited to Bobby’s home again for Christmas. On the way back, I told him that I new now my deep love for him and that I would do whatever it took to make it work. I wasn’t prepared for the ‘No’, that he couldn’t just go back. The possibility of that answer had never even occurred to me.
So I went home and for three days, shut the shades, didn’t eat or sleep, just cried. Then I came back out, not sure how to go on, but took the steps out the door none-the-less, to go on.
As I had said, it was different with Ty. It was more like how it had ended with Scott, where I simply couldn’t carry the burden of keeping them together any longer. Even though I loath authority figures, I sure can be one. I dream of someone taking care of me but attract the exact opposite. Fate has a wry sense of humor.
It’s no accident that I called Ty today, while my two best friends are away with their families for Christmas. I told him I thought about what he’d said, that he knew we couldn’t have a relationship anymore but he’d sure hate to lose me out of his life completely. I’d hate that too, so I called to say so.
It wasn’t enough that my family had forgiven him, my friends must too. He invited me then to spend Christmas Eve with him and his roomie. When I declined the mistletoe, spirits and romantic setup, he knew I feared seeing him, and was emboldened. He demanded I take him to work for making him late. Everything was back to right where we had left off for him, with no reflection nor change. Fifteen minutes later he called to let me know he had my number now. He’s as manipulative as ever!
With no where to escape the world, as I unraveled from Ty, I’d called Grady. The ambulance drivers drove me all over town, refusing to take me to Grady, arguing I didn’t need it. I sat then on the 13th floor for hours of observation, on a chair, till I was again dismissed. I returned and was escorted out by security. On the street I threw myself into a parked truck, ending up with nothing worse than a bad knot on my head. Then I wandered down the street a block, with paranoia setting in. I imagined the world ending somehow because of me, and that the all nations and the public were watching me on highest alert. Returning to the lobby, I peed on myself. Finally I returned to the 13th floor again, and was told to wait in a room to be admitted. I didn’t want that either. A doctor came out to take me in. I refused. So they reluctantly arrested me, charging me with criminal trespass. I imagined my parents saw me taken to jail, on national TV, as a disgraced terrorist. I stayed in jail three days, refusing to leave the first day because I was unwilling to be out there yet. That first night there I asked for solitary confinement, and imagined I heard the bombs falling outside, the beginning of the end. Jail provided just the escape and containment I had needed, though, and I’d avoided a diagnosis that would have followed me forever.
I think I unravel so because I finally experience love, like a genie in a bottle for three thousand years, finally out, and about to be stuffed back away again. My word means something. I begged Ronny, my friend not to take the vows of chastity as a priest, without meaning it. He crossed his fingers. When I told my parents I’d never love a man like I’d loved Mickie, I didn’t cum with another one till Ty, some twenty-five years later. And when desire was released then it was the start of a new life, not a continuation of the old. I really meant to be with Bocko, Mickie, Scott, Bobby and Ty forever. I just couldn’t. These memoirs though are beginning to reconnect all the fragments, and bridge the chasm between this life and that former one.
Isn’t my spiritual life imprisoned in a similar bottle, just waiting for the right rub, to release it?
I was collapsing in on myself, after my fathers death and the final break off with Ty. I was getting very anxious, having a hard time doing the simplest things. I couldn’t face the world, but this time I couldn’t simply hide away from it either. The world would not go away that easily this time, till I was ready to come back. I had clients, and a job that I’d have to call each day to make my excuse, and three days away would require a note from a doctor. Besides I’d be called here at the house.
This had happened once before, when it finally sank in that it was over with Bobby, the artist I’d been with when I first came to Atlanta. When nothing I could do would change that, it hit bedrock. I had pulled away from Bobby first, about a year before the end. It had happened when I went home, that all my romantic feelings evaporated, no matter that I’d brought him with me, for the very purpose of bridging that very disconnect. I actually got sick, supposably from food poisoning from a sealed apple juice drink, so that I threw up beginning about an hour from home, every half hour, for three days. He flew back after two days. After that, the distance and emptiness between us grew and grew.
In the end I had known he was seeing some guy from his gym. So it was mutual that we’d separate. But a month after that, I knew I’d pushed him away, not intentionally, but had just the same. It wasn’t a far push though, given his inherent detachment though. But now I knew I loved him absolutely and would do anything to get him back. Anything!
I wasn’t confusing him with perfection, though. In fact, he was a lousy lover. He’d resent his way into it, do it quickly, and then refuse to touch or talk afterwards. And I loved his art but it’d consume him. For three weeks or a month, he’d paint on it night and day. Nothing else existed when it had a hold of him. And when it was done, and beautiful, and moving, and perfect, he’d start another. He was a quiet, insular guy. He could be an asshole too. He’d told my Mom seeing Illinois in winter, was to see death, an utterly depressing place, where even the firs turned rust brown. It looked to him like the day after a nuclear holocaust, devoid of life. So true but how callous.
But after he was away a month, the spell of going home was finally broken, and my feelings were back. I wept. I really, really loved him, faults and all. How could those feelings have been lost at home?
I’ve always had the ability to turn completely cold, where my feelings were gone, where I could erase my Dad, so that he no longer could touch me, where he no longer existed. In computers detachment was handy. In a crisis I was an automaton, unhampered by care, urgency, regret or fear. The sheer opposite of collapsed in on myself, where emotions and feeling had devastated me, and laid me to waste, where I couldn’t go on. Untouchable, I was unassailable.
So there were advantages to being an automaton. I was efficient, things ran as they should, money was plentiful. Circumstances, consequences, hopes, disappointments, were so irrelevant they were forgotten. In fact each night I did a complete reset of the hard-drive within me, back to the pristine way it had come from the factory originally. All the wear on me from the day, where anyone or anything had gotten in, was erased. I slept like a happy Australian. No concerns, mate. It might make me sick going back home, to be snapped back into the way I’d learned to survive where a person could not, but snap back I did anyhow. And my life was instantly back on track, reset, regardless of how I wanted it, or felt. Hell, that was the beauty of it, I no longer felt or willed.
Maybe some of Bobby’s detachment in his art and as a lover came from home too. I’d first gone to his place, years before, for Christmas. We’d come in in the middle of the night, about 2 AM. It was snowing and cold, on their ranch, about an hour south of Nashville. Bobby jumped down out of the big farm Silverado, he’d bought from his father. It fit some past him and yet didn’t fit a suave interior architect in Atlanta. Looking out my door then I saw a part Rottweiler, part St. Bernard, Cujo, with a head the size of a bear. I hauled Bobby’s ass back in the truck until he’d told Cujo three times that I was not to be eaten.
Cujo never took his eyes off me the whole three days we were there. The first day he would stay between two and four feet from me, staring unflinchingly at me at all times. Day two, he’d stay in the same room, perhaps slightly aside of me. Day three he’d be in earshot of me. I was on a short leash.
When we came in that first night, Bobby had tucked me in his old bed, and giving me a kiss and Cujo a pat, he then slipped down the hall, in the dark, to sleep on a bench in the laundry room. As I got up to pee, feeling my way to my door and out into the hall, a big set of arms suddenly embraced me, and lips kissed me on the neck, saying ‘Welcome home son.’
Three days later, as we left, I said to Bobby, ‘I’ve never been more confused in my life.’ One moment your father clearly likes me, where he’s proudly showing me his race-horses, and the next I’m sure he’s going to kill me outright. What was going on with him, I asked? Bobby said, ‘I did amazingly well.’ I was the first guy friend he’d had to the ranch since he was 12, that his father hadn’t physically thrown off. I’m sure I had deeply confused the poor old guy, since I was in deep, deep hiding, even from myself. Lucky for me, since he was just the type to literally have killed me, had he known.
So with my burning desire, I had managed to get invited to Bobby’s home again for Christmas. On the way back, I told him that I new now my deep love for him and that I would do whatever it took to make it work. I wasn’t prepared for the ‘No’, that he couldn’t just go back. The possibility of that answer had never even occurred to me.
So I went home and for three days, shut the shades, didn’t eat or sleep, just cried. Then I came back out, not sure how to go on, but took the steps out the door none-the-less, to go on.
As I had said, it was different with Ty. It was more like how it had ended with Scott, where I simply couldn’t carry the burden of keeping them together any longer. Even though I loath authority figures, I sure can be one. I dream of someone taking care of me but attract the exact opposite. Fate has a wry sense of humor.
It’s no accident that I called Ty today, while my two best friends are away with their families for Christmas. I told him I thought about what he’d said, that he knew we couldn’t have a relationship anymore but he’d sure hate to lose me out of his life completely. I’d hate that too, so I called to say so.
It wasn’t enough that my family had forgiven him, my friends must too. He invited me then to spend Christmas Eve with him and his roomie. When I declined the mistletoe, spirits and romantic setup, he knew I feared seeing him, and was emboldened. He demanded I take him to work for making him late. Everything was back to right where we had left off for him, with no reflection nor change. Fifteen minutes later he called to let me know he had my number now. He’s as manipulative as ever!
With no where to escape the world, as I unraveled from Ty, I’d called Grady. The ambulance drivers drove me all over town, refusing to take me to Grady, arguing I didn’t need it. I sat then on the 13th floor for hours of observation, on a chair, till I was again dismissed. I returned and was escorted out by security. On the street I threw myself into a parked truck, ending up with nothing worse than a bad knot on my head. Then I wandered down the street a block, with paranoia setting in. I imagined the world ending somehow because of me, and that the all nations and the public were watching me on highest alert. Returning to the lobby, I peed on myself. Finally I returned to the 13th floor again, and was told to wait in a room to be admitted. I didn’t want that either. A doctor came out to take me in. I refused. So they reluctantly arrested me, charging me with criminal trespass. I imagined my parents saw me taken to jail, on national TV, as a disgraced terrorist. I stayed in jail three days, refusing to leave the first day because I was unwilling to be out there yet. That first night there I asked for solitary confinement, and imagined I heard the bombs falling outside, the beginning of the end. Jail provided just the escape and containment I had needed, though, and I’d avoided a diagnosis that would have followed me forever.
I think I unravel so because I finally experience love, like a genie in a bottle for three thousand years, finally out, and about to be stuffed back away again. My word means something. I begged Ronny, my friend not to take the vows of chastity as a priest, without meaning it. He crossed his fingers. When I told my parents I’d never love a man like I’d loved Mickie, I didn’t cum with another one till Ty, some twenty-five years later. And when desire was released then it was the start of a new life, not a continuation of the old. I really meant to be with Bocko, Mickie, Scott, Bobby and Ty forever. I just couldn’t. These memoirs though are beginning to reconnect all the fragments, and bridge the chasm between this life and that former one.
Isn’t my spiritual life imprisoned in a similar bottle, just waiting for the right rub, to release it?
posted by LifeWriter at 9:20 PM
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