RAISING MY THREE SONS ON MY OWN

Ruth’s Chris was my stomping ground for effecting change in building codes to save historic structures and to put monies in the pockets of my employers, a triumvirate of a chemical company, a wood treater and the big miners. Naturally the home builders association, good old boys with dark side Mafioso connections would stop at nothing to thwart our desired mandates. But they didn’t cause the car wreck. My husband fell asleep at the wheel on the three hour trek north at midnight, after the meal.

So two years post wreck, post political dinner, having lost the initiative to mandate treated wood but making progress with a Belle Chase military Base and one Hope VI project in New Orleans framed entirely with borate treated wood, I planned to have lunch with my son, Cahir Doherty. He had a scholarship to LSU and his own apartment.

I called and called, but no answer. When I arrived, I saw a painting like a volcano on the grey door of Cahir’s F150 truck. Maybe a dream sicle had melted, creating the art. Maybe it was practise for a science project, with Cahir… who knows.

I licked my finger and smeared it through the art, on one level I must have already suspected it was blood. Walking around the truck I discovered the entire bed covered in the same rust color. I found him inside, passed out. His nicked artery scotch taped closed. He lived.

And he lived and lived and lived through harrowing, life halting events. Fracturing 30 places through both plates of his skull, egg shell cracks of the fragile basal skull from an avalanche in New Mexico he caused by leaving the trail in a race and pulling up on 14 foot pine trees on the lip of the mountain, which dislodged, along with boulders. His brothers witnessed him falling upside down through space. Niall, the boys father, knew before he turned on the trail. He recalled the high pitched mournful, cry of irrevocability from Ian. A death cry. He landed on rock face thirty five feet below, or on a small patch of grass covered with leaves, the only padding on rock face. They saw him try to stand and his head wobbling unable to be lifted above shoulders and then, a crumpling. He was supposed to have a craniotomy or later experience seizures or have his brains grow through his nose, causing retardation or death. He survived without intervention, except for IV’s in intensive care, and stitches on his shin.

We found a top neurosurgeon who had written chapters on basal skull fractures and believed that in Cahir’s case, the fractures would align and grow back together, perfectly. After six weeks of recuperation and terror everytime he sneezed ( the fear of the fractures re-opening and of a cerebrospinal fluid leak) he was given clearance to go back to school. No bumps, no running. No PE. He blew on a duck call before getting in the car with the other children and clear fluid poured out of his nose. We were going to have to airlift him for an immediate craniotomy. Cerebrospinal fluid leaves a perfect circular pattern on paper towels, and has an unforgettable sweet taste. He laid on his back for an hour, and when he arose, the leakage had stopped.

The following year he was shot point blank in the face. The bullet missed everything vital and he doesn’t even have a scar, as the barrel parted muscles in the corner of his eye, tearing only the lachrymal duct, which recannalized. His hair fell out in tufts, leaving geometric patterns, rectangles of allopecia which I think was from the radioactive isotopes in the dyes from the angiography when surgeons went in through the femoral artery to cauterize the bleeder.They thought it was the carotid, but it was a lesser vessel.

Cahir in trauma unit at LSU, 12 doctors and nurses, sliding on bloody floors, my job to hold up a hand towel to catch the paint ball like trajectories, the clots that emanated from his nose and mouth as he coughed and sneezed, drowning from his own blood draining from inside his head. “Be a soldier,” he said to Ian his bother, as they wheeled him away, giving us not much hope that they’d make it in time to save him. But they did.

And he came out thinking he was Tupac instead of getting it. He got it for a week, or rather said the things his more mature friends, his real friends insisted on him saying if he wanted the continuance of their friendship.

They said they were tired of being pall bearers at friends funerals over drugs and stupidity. One was a banker, one in construction. Childhood friends of Cahir’s who were at our house almost every week-end, told him the only chrome he saw growing up was on old people’s wheel chairs. That he was from an educated affluent loving family, not poverty and abuse. That his sagging, silver heavy chain wearing, gansta rap persona was passé, a phase they admitted to having been in, but grew out of, and theat he, too must move forward. Embrace growth, get over it. Get over himself.

Yet he insisted that I give him “dap.” Had a fight with me when I refused. Hit closed knuckles to everyone else’s saying dap. He used double negatives and eubonics when he spoke to doctors. It was truly miraculous that Cahir lived, and doctors came in on Easter Sunday, marveling at his sterling condition, no permanent damage. No follow up needed besides tracking the tear duct. Cahir was practically unscathed from being shot point blank in the eye. The roof of his mouth revealed broken vessels, tracking the path of the bullet. It missed esophagus trachea, brain, nerves (that is what suprized them most, touching his face with his eyes covered and finding no neurological deficit.) everything except sinus cavities, which would calcify. He already had trouble flying and couldn’t scuba dive because of the cracks from the 35 foot fall on rock face.

My son Cahir sat in a hospital bed with the following scene repeating as fresh doctors did rounds with patients they had never seen before.

Doc appears outside of hospital room door. He or she picks up chart, reads the intake and enters the room of the victim of a gunshot wound to the face. Doctor looks at patient, and jerks agrily toward the nurse, flaring anger at the obvious error…his boy has not been shot in the face. This boy has a black eye. No stitches, no trauma and he is sitting up in bed, coherent, with his fist extended, lifting his chin, encouraging the doctor to give him dap, back.

Chele, his Hispanic girlfriend comes to the hospital every day. She is a senior and has never learned to drive. Most boys think she is extraordinarily attractive, especially as Cahir has her dressed like Little Kim. She is lean, exotic looking with a narrow face, doe eyes and a slender, aristocratic but not aquiline nose. She looks as if she should have kohl around here eyes and a tiny ruby nose ring. But she has an extra set of eye teeth, visable when she smiles.

When I arrived at the hospital, and saw Cahir, having confirmed on my race to the hospital that my firstborn baby had been shot in the face with a .25, he was talking trash. He was drunk, messed up. He didn’t really want anything to do with me, pushed me away, as he embraced Chele, her little sis, and her very young, mother, saying loudly, This is my family right here.

I was crushed but amazement and concern kept me drinking in the scene. The attendant RN’s and LPNs bit their lips and crossed their arms tightly around their bodies, shaking their heads. Most of them, in this small town, already had a fair idea of the difficulties and traumas I had endured with Cahir. Their attitudes were a direct reflection of his apparent ungratefulness coupled with the fact that he acted as if he had done something marvelous and admirable instead of risking his life stupidly buying drugs

. He obviously didn’t think he was at risk of dying. With bullets to the head, it can take a while for the bleeding to show, to drain into the lungs, to asphyxiate.

Regardless of Cahir’s wishes, I was the only one allowed to ride in the ambulance as he was transferred to a trauma unit at a large University hospital. By the time we arrived, he was going downhill fast.

I was numb, for the first time in my life. It didn’t happen during childbirth, or during the shooting by Mickey’s ex. Not when Cahir’s shirt and the skin of his belly were sucked into the escalator intake belt, and he was nearly disemboweled, at a third world airport in St. Martin, on the way to Paris, not when he was busted, any of the times, not even when I sat and slept on the cold floor outside of the schizophrenic unit waiting for my 20 minutes, to catch a glimpse of the boy not on earth. I never felt completely numb, emotionless in all of my life except for this experience. I felt nothing. It was too, too horrible. My worst fear was realized. I couldn’t save him from himself.The reality was as bad as the fear I lived with of him committing vehicular homicide or being in prison for life. My son was dying from being shot in his precious face, his Cahir-face, in a drug deal. Two men, who had begun the day with $5.00, they bragged, and ended it by having done $1,000 worth of cocaine, planned to steal my son and his companions’s money, kill them, take the truck and go to Houston.

As A A Milne might say, “Now he is twenty five”

A woman friend saw him in Austin and commented “He’s so handsome he doesn’t even look human.” By the absolute grace of God Cahir is fine, well, adjusted, happy, healed.

I had decided, after Byron stood me up, again, that I wanted no part of him, and that I would never answer his calls. If I softened and did pick up the phone, I’d tell him I didn’t wanted to see him anymore.

He called, I answered. He was on his way. He could spend the night. My intention transmogrified into “yes,” as I thought about the sex. Which was great; aggressive, intense. Above the river, unseen, but heard, surely, from the midst of a bamboo thicket. Underneath us, smooth hardness, the raised wooden meditation platform, perched on a precipice.

His age matched his ACT Score. Young and bright. And educated, confidently insinuating “Wahhabism” -the strict interpretation of Shia, -into my ”Studies in Terrorism” white paper submission, for the Department of Defense. He was at home with the works of my favorite late nineteenth century Russian authors, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Even Turgenev.

I further queried his knowledge of spiritual avatars from the same period. He didn’t know Ouspenski, but recalled Rasputen. I spoke of Gurdjeff.

Byron was blond and slight of frame, but had been an effective tight end for a north Louisiana high school football team, during a stellar season. He had evenly distributed musculature, like a boxer, not a lifter. Bantum weight.

He had a beautiful, perfect…everything. It made me sing and squeal. I discovered what I’d been missing that other women thrilled to, being on top. He went so deep in me, hitting my g spot, mind blowingly.

Anxious for a replay, in the morning, focusing my breath, and resting in his arms, images from the previous night gripped me. I anticipated, tremulously, how he’d roll me over some way and enter me and just rock my interior, my psyche, making me weave and weave and weave.

I’d trip; our sex opened chambers, rock face split suddenly revealing hidden passageways, treasure troves spelunkered along neural pathways not consciously known. This morning’s stimulation ignited parts of my brain decidedly distinct from the Jeopardy-esque category of “Russian authors and avatars.” Now, unveiled, dancing like gumdrops in my hippocampus, were scenes from the unvented laundry room of my childhood home.

I remembered with such vivid clarity, chickens, baby chicks, one black and one yellow, in a shallow rectangular Easter basket in the cold washroom. It was a bright cold Louisiana April morning. My father took my hand in his, and led me to a dry cleaning slip he’d “found” on his pillow. The marks, blue ink in loops, glyphs, were instructions, from the Easter Bunny. ”Look in the laundry room for your present.” The Easter Bunny.

I tore down the hall in foot pajamas and found an Easter basket, neatly woven strips of thin light beige, chartreuse faux “grass,” hard boiled eggs (I never knew why anyone would eat them) dyed sky blue, and these two tiny chicks which fit, one at a time, in my four year old palm.

They lived in a box in the wash room, and then were ensconced in milk crates, one inverted on top of the other, in our back yard. Beyond our yard lay a ravine, a Shetland pony farm, and beyond that, fields studded with pecan trees, that extended to the levee between the Red River and the Cane.

One evening, there was a sudden, terrible racket in the back yard, punctuated by gunfire, and then, silence. My mother’s gaze was riveted, staring out the kitchen window, as the salmon croquettes began to burn. A dog, a wild dog, a mongrel came in our yard and killed my chickens. We called him “Chicken Killer” and, even though my father ran outside and fired repeatedly at the dog with a shot gun, the threat, terrifying and delicious, was there, that any evening, at dusk, Chicken Killer might appear.

He was lean, a hound dog, brown, with spots that belied his lack of breeding, and a large skull, ravenous. Incisors, maybe foam. In my child’s mind, rabid. Wild.

I lay in Byron’s arms, he is so still, and I see these chicks and feel the fresh cold that made me shiver and am aware of the scent of Tide, boot leather and saddle soap. It hits me like Flaubert’s petit madelines in Swann’s Way.

How was this part of my brain stimulated ? by his scent? His sex? My response? Hyperbole aside, did the sex or the attendant weaving equal the thrill of racing down the linoleum floored hall in foot pajamas, rounding corners, touching and turning the brass knob, revealing baby chicks delivered to me, from the Easter Bunny?

What part of the weaving is unearthing of memories? Is the weaving part of natural selection? What does it mean when it is this potent, pheromones or limbic system bingo? What part reality, the reading of another’s heart energy, or of one’s own, long buried, and what part wishful?

It is the most powerful thing I do, the weaving, bringing its essence into awareness. It is where my babies came from, energetically, beyond birds and bees. It is who they are, the essence of the DNA I did read and combine, strand upon strand. I wove it; I continue to weave, entwining that which I discern, with my own, and that knowledge filters through my awareness when there is potency.

My friend Jane says she is just hopeless. Hopeless. She says all she wants is to be at home with *****, to wear an apron and bake for him, and for him to deftly undo the apron strings, and have sex with her in the kitchen. Everywhere. All the time. We love to weave.

Idolo- A Road Trip with  Mexican boxing champ Marco Antonio Rubio

by Christine Maynard

In Mexico, a boxer, while he is winning, is a demi-God. Machismo manifests in its purest form in the boxing gyms, rings, and coliseums where peleadors  perform. Marco Antonio Rubio, best known as “Veneno,” (venom,) 31-2 with 29 KO’s, embodies this machismo, and more. He is incredibly gifted and confident, with laser-like focus and an energy level that makes him larger than life.

I joined him on a road trip from Austin, Texas, where he trains with other high ranked Mexican Nationals, (including Jesus Chavez,) to his home town of Torreon, Mexico, where he fought… and won.

Traveling with a high-profile hero, from the luxury of elitist country clubs nestled amid mountains, to  street corners in Coahuila, with crowds of children clamoring for Veneno’s attention, was quite impressive. His image, along with his opponent, Leon “Ice Cold” Pearson, appeared on huge light emitting diode billboards, reminiscent of Times Square. Marco is fueled by the feedback from his fans,  whom he attends graciously.

Yet the seminal event was witnessing Marco Antonio Rubio fight. I learned that fighting is noble. That fighting is real. The appeal is visceral, obviously, but on a more subtle level it touches the spirit.

The heart of a true fighter is his strength. This strength is funded by belief, which through osmosis or alchemy becomes every man’s ability to believe. This hope is primed, behind the eyes and in the hearts of the masses, when they watch their fighter. It is magic, unlike any other sport.

A fighter becomes the transformative agent for the people, capable, if he wins, of transmuting despair into hope. This redemptive power of belief in a fighter is enthralling; he is like the Host raised high, bells signaling the change. His presence in the ring creates an incendiary pandemic, spreading startlingly, in which every cell becomes more alive, animated.  That’s what boxing is. That’s what boxing is about.

I first met Rubio in Richard Lord’s gym. He had twinkling eyes, with a perpetual smile one couldn’t resist returning. “A world class boxer” those who knew said, as Marco sparred on Saturdays. But there are lots of world class boxers, title holders and champions in the gym. I had no concept of his “idolo” status.

On a Tuesday in August, mid-morning, after training, we left Austin, heading west on 90 through the valley. The gorgeous, blue canopy that stretched above the straight west Texas highway was a cross between Wyoming, and an Italian Renaissance painting, in which cherubs are sucked into azure Duomo ceilings, amidst tufts of clouds. I felt as if we were bulging into a bubble of sky.

Trennice Brown, a bad-boy, black boxer from New Orleans by way of  Cincinnati, slept in the back seat of Marco’s Chevrolet, as we drove past hunting ranches, with metal cut outs of wild hogs, or ducks in formation above the gates, as advertisements.  In Uvalde, we pass the soon–to-open Oasis Outback. Two story palm trees at the entrance are alluring, yet the cultural dissonance of a west Texan Sultan theme fills me with  prescience- expect the unexpected on this trip.

Trennice and I had no idea where we were headed, only that I was to act as his corner and that Marco had been instructed to not let us out of his sight.    Trennice KO’d Jhonny Torres, in 37 second in Houston. He has a fierce left hook and incredible musculature-genetics, not discipline. He is the opponent for “Chloro” Ruben Padilla, on the undercard of Marco’s fight.

A dream catcher hung from the rear view mirror.  Conversation was conducted through a translating device, out of necessity. But gestures and expressions worked best for conveying meaning.

Marco showed me photographs on his cell phone of his girlfriend, golfing, a dashing dark-suit-clad Marco speaking at a dinner, and a few pics of gyms at which we would stop, in order to train. What looked like aboriginal drumming was actually boxers with heavy hammers lifted high, then thrust down rhythmically to strengthen the arms.

When we arrived in the city of Acuna, across the border from Del Rio, I couldn’t ignore Marco’s name painted in red- large block letters- above the entrance of the gym, a white metal barn-like building. The bathrooms were stalls facing the ring, with colorful graffiti, and a pre-Jack Lalayne treadmill was missing its conveyor belt- only the wooden cylinders turned. It was easier to envision it as a reflexology device hyped in an in-flight magazine than it was to realize champions have trained on this.

Mosquitoes made speed bag work torturous; they breed in abandoned tires which punctuated the grounds outside the gym. Young boys and men trained with an intensity and seriousness that spoke- “this is the only way out.”

According to Marco’s promoter in Mexico, Hector Sanchez, his move to  Austin,Texas, in order to work with Fernando “Flaco” Castrejon, has made him a different fighter. Even better. Jesus Chavez, who also trains under  Flaco stated that “Marco is in the place where he needs to be-where his career can progress.”

Hector is a used car salesman who owns a compound of concrete shotgun houses and an SUV. He also promotes Baby Face, Julio Garcia. Julio is a rising star with a 30-2 record and 24 knock outs, He is only eighteen. And he is under the tutelage of Marco. They are friends, gliding through the same swath of illustriousness and paparazzi, Spartan discipline, hard training, and the single-mindedness to place boxing above everything else in the world. Always.

Marco eats organic almonds and baby carrots, snacks I brought. Trennice buys chips, twinkies, a soda and a pack of cigarettes. We stay at a Best Western where Marco is feted, favored, and later we go out for dinner. There are mariachi bands and a synthesizer. The food is good, and Trennice and I order two for one Negro Modellos- it is happy hour.

I awaken at 7:00 a.m. with eyelids swollen from mucho cerveza .The boys call, having finished a morning run, and are ready to roll. I shower, grab coffee and my backpack and we head to Hector’s to pick up his SUV so Baby Face and his father can join us on the road to Torreon.

Hector’s spare is shredded from a blow out. We have no choice except to rouse a tire man. This is tricky, and our departure is delayed. Marco appears edgy, but polite.  I only later realize that a media event is scheduled for our arrival, including photo shoots of sparring. We are unable to release the rim from the underbelly of the vehicle. After many attempts, along with unloading and re packing luggage, satin fight robes, bottled waters, and respective CD cases, mandatory boxing equipment, we are cruising.

Conversation becomes more facile. We drive through areas of protected flora and fauna, in the mountains. Trennice has flashbacks from Vision Quest. The counselors told him that if he chose to run away, just over the top of the mountain he’d see Tucson. Trennice and two others left in “boxers,” with no other clothing, not even shoes. They took horse blankets and cut them up for moccasins. They side stepped snakes, jumped ravines,  and were exhausted upon reaching the top where they saw mountains as far as the eye revealed, not Tucson.

Marco delights in violin overtures moving his right hand in the air, drawing the bow, when he hears strings. He plays air accordion as well, while we drive. He is an admixture of passion and childlike enthusiasm. He looks like a young Sean Penn.

At the media event, Marco warms up in a hooded windbreaker and work out pants. He shadow boxes, wearing layers in 100 degrees and no AC, alternating high forward kicks while touching his toes, with punches, hooks, jabs. The boxers pose with fists prominently displayed for photographers. Interviews followed.

We leave two hours later and check into the Torreon Best Western, which is very nice, with plenty of amenities and attentive staff. Marco has a tight Achilles tendon on his right leg from a misstep, landing on the outside of his right foot. He asks for a massage and I oblige.  He skips dinner as weigh in is two days away. We drive around Torreon, making unannounced visits to gyms, and to his home.

His nephew, Jorge, was on the sidewalk, waiting for Marco. He didn’t recognize the car. When Marco rolled down the window, the ten year old was jubilant. His uncle, his father-figure, and his “idolo,” as well as the “idolo” of all his peers, was home.

Marco’s father died when he was only fifteen. His mother, Lupe, died last year. She had been on dialysis, due to diabetes. He keeps a photo of her- sleeping while in the hospital- on his phone, as a screen saver.

He had just signed with Golden Boy Promotions, and was in Hidalgo preparing for a fight, which was to be aired on HBO Latino. His mother died on Sunday. He returned to Torreon for her funeral. On Thursday, he was victorious against Jeffrey Hill.

At the hotel before the fight, Marco appeared relaxed. The electricity and water had gone out an hour before our departure time. Fighters and opponents spoke amiably in the lobby. Once we arrived at the coliseum, the only sign of Marco in the boxer’s dressing room was his red satin robe, hung on a wall, covered in dry cleaning film.

Hours later, after Julio “Baby Face” Garcia’s fight, I found Veneno, dressed, juiced, pumped. Super charged, neck snapping, flashes popping, high voltage electricity surging-it’s source, Marco Antonio Rubio. His potency was palpable. He was on his power. Yet, he continued to quip with reporters and pose with kids.

Nowhere was Marco more amazing than in the ring. He tore his opponent apart with meticulous attention to detail. His method was perfectly orchestrated and executed, like a war theatre. A war theatre with the  Marx brothers as alter ego, that is. When Leon cowered on the ropes, forearms locked in front of his face, his only vestige of defense before the battering ram “Veneno,”  Marco interjected humor which made the crowd go wild. At the height of dramatic tension, Marco’s gloved hand hovering, arm cocked, he exaggerated a wind-up, cartoon-like, before sending it home. He played with Leon, a cat dissecting a mouse at its leisure.

He thrills his audience. And he knows exactly what he is doing every step of the way. When Leon’s mouthpiece hit the floor, Marco pantomimed surprise, shot down to retrieve it, and popped it in Leon’s mouth like a pacifier. The fans roared.

He KO’d Leon in the fourth round. The crowd pushed into the ring. Leon and his manager, Don Hale, disappeared into a hotel van. Don had mentioned earlier that it could be rough here, recalling another fight in the Expo Gomez Palacio where bottles were thrown, and leaving the stadium was almost impossible.

Marco Antonio Rubio is spectacularly confident, and loves his life. Others love his life- and life force- right along with him. He is a champion, and he is unforgettable. There is a purity about him which makes his essence shine.

He has four boxing championship belts,  but he only brought them out after showing me his Our Lady of Guadeloupe string Santos, and  pictures of his family.

 First impressions.

Jesus Chavez (photo.)

posted by christine at 6:37 PM

And it could kill you. 1-3% of those who contract this horrible disease develop fulminant hepatic failure. And die. I’ll re-check these stats tomorrow when I visit my doctor, a liver transplant specialist at Tulane Abdominal Transplant Center.
I made it. But most people with ALT and AST and free bili levels like mine are in ICU. And they don’t all recover. Some begin anti virals which they stay on for four to five years if not for life. They are expensive and can have side effects as debilitating as the disease. Others’ only chance is a transplant. Some just kick the bucket.
Who’d have thought? Not me. I didn’t think all that could happen from having unprotected sex.
I’d been told by my lover that he had been tested for STD’s. He said he was clean. So, I overlooked his pumpkin orange colored urine, when I should have realized that his RBC’s weren’t breaking down, due to a disease process. And when his rotator cuff and right shoulder hurt and all he could do was lie around, I should have considered that the pain was referred from the lop sided lump bulging out from beneath his ribs on an otherwise lean and lanky frame, his “generous” liver. That’s what it is called when it is too big, and inflamed. Throwing out an S.O.S. of enzymes, ALT or SGOT. AST. My numbers were above 2000 when they had previously been 20, and 12.
I want to reference my Oxford Book of Quotations, to be reminded of what colored bile or ethers or qualities were attributed to liver. I think it is aptly named. Without it working, I couldn’t figure out why anything mattered. I didn’t feel alive. I had total disconnect. I had no hope in my body or mind.
I felt like a puppy dying of Parvo. I wouldn’t move for hours. Just my eyes. Geometry didn’t matter. Architecture. Philosophy. I was devoid of interest. Desire. Life force.
My diastolic pressure was 45 at night.
Teams of doctors interviewed me or informed me. Most were extraordinarily caring. And real. And competent.. My favorite was the young Jewish female Internist with kind eyes. I don’t remember seeing, in hospital, the rock star head of transplant surgery with the 122 page CV, in his early forties. He’s a beauty.
I had Hep B. replicating in my subfulminant liver. Who’d have thought?
My brilliant compassionate physician, Dr. Nathan Shores, took a calculated chance that I’d get well without much intervention. He didn’t want me to be impeded by feeling bad for life from meds I’d be chained to, so he gave me a chance to get well on my own, while being closely monitored.
And I got better.
I was very sick for five weeks. I was hospitalized. I lost a lot. Muscle mass. Direction in life. Ability to take care of myself or my dog or my home. But God does provide. And friends saw me through without me even having to ask.
I’m very appreciative. Still puzzled about losing my poise and balance. It was like having a spiritual stroke. I didn’t see it coming.
And you may not either.
Hep B is 50-100 times more transmittable than HIV or Hep C. Hep Delta cannot exist without Hep B, and it is often this combo which leads to sudden, acute life threatening fulminant liver.
Hep B virus can live for one month without water. It is found in saliva, tears, blood, seminal fluids. It could be caught from sharing a razor, but it is very easily transmitted sexually. I lived with the man who gave me Hep B in May and June. My blood work was positive for Hep B with recent surface antigens mid July. And I got sick suddenly in September. I didn’t think I could make it home from Rouse’s in the Quarter. My legs felt like toothpicks. I went to bed for four days and nights.
Friends came by and I’d stagger down stairs to let them in. They’d try to convince me to go to the hospital. It took a while. Everything seemed far away. I was pretty sure that this was a stage of dying.
My sleep was so disturbed, thin. The ammonia which my liver couldn’t break down was affecting my brain. I had no opinions. Even attaining non-attachment lost its shine. I was perplexed, dumbfounded, ill, and at the same time trying to be rational, responsible and keep my humour. After all, it is a grand journey.
But you can undertake it without catching hepatitis.
Get the HEP B vaccine. Don’t expose yourself. Don’t have sex with a man whose urine is dark orange because he could be a carrier or have chronic hepatitis and you could feel absolutely awful for a month or so, and then die.
Tell people they can contract Hep B sexually. And transmit it.
If there’s orange in your pee
You may already have Hep B
(Or another kind of bilirubin rising problem.)
Get checked out by your physician. Ask for a HEP B test. Get a vaccine. Use protection.
I am honored that I get to keep living.
Christine Maynard

Only Sabine knew intimately what Huelo had experienced.

     “Truly you have gained far more than you have lost.” Huelo continued.

       “It will become clearer and clearer with time, and in some ways the banality of such evil will also appear.  As horrific as some things can manifest, the small-mindedness of it all (when you have some perspective) is the most astonishing thing about evil.  It may be awful and powerful, but in the end, it’s about small and rather stupid gains.”

     “Bravo” the woman clapped and toasted, with Prosecco,  Huelo’s amazingly profound insights.

     “Just what the situation required.” Amelia said.

     Sophie, recalling an earlier thread of conversation, inquired again about the inception of evil in the life of her friend, Sabine.

“Who brought the bad to you, Sabine? Who did you let in”?

“Do you mean who was the first evil man I became involved with” Sabine replied.

     I discovered new layers. Nothing to do with Briar. Earlier. What was underneath, and underneath That.

     It didn’t make me feel weary, knowing I’d have to unravel more, an entire other relationship, knowing what I now knew. It was a necessary part of inquiring within. For freedom.

     One morning, after stretching on my home made, spring loaded pulley hanging from the ceiling, with leg attachments from a Smith machine for cross overs, I recalled events in Antigua.

Edmund

  It was Edmund who was the first, the one whose seed I stole. But I can’t start there. I have to tell you how I thought and how I changed how I thought because of my experiences.  Leading up to Edmund.  With Edmund.  Raising his progeny.  Seeing him in my sons.

      WE all were, except for you, Huelo, raised in the deep Gothic south. We were silly girls with shiny hair and lip gloss.  When I heard about someone going through a car wreck, cancer, or an IRS audit that wiped them out, I assumed that those things would never happen to me. I thought it was, almost, guaranteed that bad things, and bad people, would never enter my realm.

     Serial killers were remote Son of Sam surreal characters, “Johnny’s five miles away” slumber party stories told while drawing letters on each others’ backs, then guessing. The scary stories were delicious, chilling for the precise reason that it wouldn’t ever happen to any of us. We knew that we were…immured.

     But I learned.

     Friends, hometown acquaintances, and classmates at LSU, died. Not a pandemic from any one thing, like bird flu.  My friends, males and females in their teens and early twenties shot their brains out or overdosed  because of lost love or fearing flunking out of law school, along with other varieties of suffering.

     Shreveport sons of Petroleum Club landed gentry kept enough cocaine to fill apothecary jars, which made them stay up too many nights in a row and have car wrecks on country lanes, which took their lives.

     I thought about the staying alive for hours bit with the car wreck victims, worrying if it felt cold, and what their last thoughts were…. Foreshadowing.

     I died, clinically, three times, many years later, flung through a mashed metal roof of an SUV cruising at 80 mph. My man, my love, at the wheel. Irrevocable, that’s the word that rooted itself in my mind as the doctors brought x-rays of one smashed femur, then another, a trochanter, losing pressure, life seeping out. My husband’s mournful cry on a stretcher in the hall. Part of me intuited from his voice that it wasn’t and wouldn’t be the one I had known, ever again. Brain damage.  Irrevocable.

      In between the initial learning about loss in my twenties and the car wreck at forty two, was boy raising of two clearly sociopathic powerhouses of intellect, will and subterfuge.  A saint of a middle son. And husbands.

     I was exposed to Caribbean adventures on Antigua for two years with the boys’ father, Edmund.  We experienced hurricanes. The island looked completely different with all of the palm trees flattened and telephone poles downed, following hurricane Hugo. In retrospect, there were many appearances which I would only later realize were deceiving. Covert operations hidden by my own penumbra of badly wanting to believe.

     Huelo had heard the stories. They both laughed and marveled as Sabine told them, for different reasons.  Huelo liked the parts about the Scandinavian stewardesses who appeared in tiny, rustic Antiguan sundry shops buying Ting with their rasta man, trying, unsuccessfully to grow dreds by mussing up their naturally straight, glossy blond hair. They ate a Rastafarian diet of aloe and fungi, and they wanted a café au lait baby. 

     Sabine knew Huelo was in lust with the Cane River Creoles, and  that she daydreamed about how pretty her own little green-eyed brown skinned baby would be.

     I tried to explained the South, and societal expectations placed on me, to Huelo.

            My growing up was fear based. I dedicated myself to living an open life, as a human, as a woman, as an artist, as a sentient being, at age 20. My only role models were found in literature. I knew I would have to suffer to be a real person, and I willingly embraced that, conceptually.

“So get to the story Jane said, eager to hear something she, apparently hadn’t heard before from Sabine.

An earlier, most thorough Duping. Antigua, West Indies.

1990

      I did know that the same sun faded clothing made it impossible to tell a viscount from a vagrant, as they sat shoulder to shoulder at Pizzas in Paradise, in English Harbour in Antigua. But gaining clarity on other perceptions and deeper deceptions, involving Edmund, would take many years.

     We dined on yachts, once with Walter Cronkite. We joined Keith  Richards and  his family at the Copper and Lumber Hotel, our children playing together in English Harbour. I spent much time in the company of the Julian family, of Versailles on the Zeneca . In aristocratic, guttural French he would enunciate “Sant ex zoo pay ray”…comprends? But I didn’t. I spoke a little French. We sere discussing Rabalais. And then this author who I apparently didn’t know. It was unclear due to his accent.

“ He wrote The Little Prince.  We were fighter pilots together.” And then it became clear. The truth was obscured unintentionally, unliked when one is Duped.

     Our home was a two hundred year old farmhouse in the countryside of Antigua, not far from the latest upscale development, Emerald Cove. Costa Smerelda. “A piece of Sardinia in the Caribbean” is how it was marketed.  Cultural dissonance abounds in the islands.

 It was ChogyamTrungpa’s face upon which I gazed as I sat on a woven mat, meditating. I was up high, outside, on a narrow, breezy third story balcony.   

 Beyond Trungpa’s face, in our yard, I could see the only example of a slave dungeon in the islands. When the boys and I climbed in we discovered, etched on the walls, details of ships with masts and sails. The floor of the little dome was littered with goat bones.  There was a tiny window which could be closed by degrees, allowing only a slit for air. How wide was up to the master’s discretion.

     Trungpa’s face was on the back of a book, The Myth of Freedom, which was propped up on my altar; he was my spiritual guide. We never met.

     Maitreya introduced me to his writings, in Scotland, on Lake Lamond. His eyes anchored me, and his methodology for achieving something akin to enlightenment, appeared to be as easy as one two three. But, backwards.

     One must,Trungpa suggests, inquire within, and work backwards through the Five Skandas, also referred to as the Five Heaps of Ignorance, to become free from self-imprisonment.

     I practiced. It was easy, visually. Not as challenging as breaking through koans, nor as tedious as nam yo ho-ing. Just picturing total ignorance and stuckness, aided byTrungpa’s fresh descriptions of how humans solidify reality, i.e., form ego, and then, reversing it. I chose one potent memory from my own life at each prescribed step, allowing it to waft up, unencumbered by judgment,  which allowed much that was unnecessary to fall away.

     Becoming un-duped is a similar process. Hard work, following bread crumbs back to a place of no separation, eyes wide open. Un-Duped. For where it begins, the Duping, that is the most difficult question.

I moved to Antigua, with Edmund, and my three sons right after my father’s death. I left Edmund with Daniel and Gambier in New Mexico, and took Denali, a newborn, to be with my father in hospital in Louisiana. I never saw our home again. I don’t know if the tree we planted, Denali’s placenta nestled beneath, thrived.

     Edmund said my Norwegian snow fox fur from the Mardi Gras ball in D.C. fetched a good price at a garage sale. Good thing I’d already learned detachment, and the benefits of losing material possessions.

     He’d found a great job in the Caribbean. Setting up sales and marketing for First Call, a subsidiary of Cable and Wireless which all the Brits called Able and Tireless. We met in Miami, Terminal D, and flew together to our new home.

     Within a month of our arrival, we settled on a “fine people’s” house, living with furniture Edmund hammered together, make shift beds and tables, in Sweet’s Village. Ours was a sanitized, sterile lawn fronting a brick two story, sans character, All of the other houses were wooden, tiny, blue and melon colored with neat little gardens and hotel maid’s uniforms fluttering on a clothesline, in the breeze.

    The shutters slammed on our neighbors’ homes at five p.m., to keep the “jumbies” or baby stealing spirits out, no air conditioning.  A status symbol was how many dead refrigerators one kept in the yard, from brown outs.

     Edmund and I attended a Garden Party in Bailey Heights. Very white people who never tanned milled about; they were the ones who shopped at the exorbitantly expensive ex-pats’ grocery store with Sara Lee cakes and specialty items, like Christmas crackers.

     A heavy set rather jolly man with a mustache and a handkerchief always handy was speaking with Edmund.  They exchanged business card.

     “Edmund Spencer. First Call.” The man pronounced the words as if he were in a play.

      “ I’ve been waiting for you to show up” the man said.

     “Sorry” Edmund replied, in his perfectly articulated Queen’s English, insinuating, apparently, that he was almost insulted,.

     “Yes, that storage unit you rented with the boat and sat com equipment”

     Edmund’s eyes swept the multitude of faces near by, and he took the chap by his upper arm, directing him away from the others. I watched as he pointed out two Adarondyke chairs situated between yellow frangipani, curtain plants and a lipstick tree.

     I observed the seriousness with which they spoke. Their mouths moved silently. The wall dividing the garden from the third hole of this award winning coveted Course was topped with shards of glass, broken coke bottles, and rusted knife blades inlaid in concrete. It struck me as ghetto art but functional, a substitute for Concertina wire, nothing ersatz about it.

     My attention was diverted by the hostess, a gracious, naïve, appreciative young woman, a red head, slight, who spoke of her love for cooking and entertaining developing from her years in an orphanage. She was lovely, bright, compassionate. And she knew exactly what temperature to dip the geometry of strawberries, mostly isosceles triangles, into the finest granulated sugar to assure no clumps. She stuffed huge local tomatoes with chicken salad, served basmati rice with cardamom seeds, and roast pheasant. We were  accustomed to roadside “drive through” called goat stew, which was prolific in the islands.

     The genteel society was a salve for me, after adapting to village life, where the answer to how many children do you have, to most young (30’s) mothers was “three dead, ten living.” Children fetched water from a pump. The schoolhouse was a rotten wood frame structure; desolate. Children in Sweet’s had never seen the ocean, although it was only a bus ride away, fifteen minutes to English Harbour.

     It wasn’t uncommon to see Montessori school uniforms from garage sales worn as fancy clothing for kids whose molars were rings with gum showing through the middle.

      I volunteered with the WHO/Mellon Foundation, to deliver babies on Saturday, when the midwife went to St. John’s. This party reminded me of the South.  Louisiana polite society. It was refreshing.

     Edmund strode across the close cropped lawn with his chest flared and shoulders thrust back, shining that confident smile. Or confidence smile.

     That’s what I remembered. That’s what opened another chapter of Duping. One frozen image took me back to re-examine Doris Lessing’s statement, “We know things long before we know we do.”

    I realized today, 17 years later, how stupid, how dupe-able I was, to believe the “secret treasure trove of windfall sat com equipment in a warehouse story.” I never questioned, that Edmund met a perfect stranger at a party, gave him a business card, the man recognized the name, ostensibly, as one of his renters, and Edmund, ever quick on the uptake, simply went along with it. In order to take what might be in the unit if the error was “in his favor.” Like a helpful monopoly card.

     But I saw how naturally the conversation happened. Edmund played it off so smoothly that I never previously thought to look deeper.

     I think of my friends today who I know are duped. I point out to a friend that she needs out of town advice instead of trusting a local CPA, part of the good old  boys’ association. She recently signed off any and all ownership of his cancer treatment center business,  trusting, that their guidance for her to be a beneficiary in place of ownership, for tax purposes, was indeed in her best interest.

     She doesn’t see what’s coming. I didn’t see it either. Either time. Any of the myriad times I was duped.

Will I be duped again? Probably not. I’ll have to live a long time just to unravel all the duping I’ve already had.     

     It’s like that; you grow a clarity out of the sadness and pain that becomes its own little sat com equipment in your brain. As accurate as the exquisite instrumentation of a delicate recording arm thinner than a needle. Charting waves shifts and changes on special oceanographer paper, under glass on luxurious yachts.

      Sitting in the captain’s chair observing, the sounds of subtlety as ink charts on light blue squares is akin to being in the Louvre, but more sexuality is conjured up than paintings of dead rabbits and cut up lemons in the Dutch Masters’ section ever evoked, for me.

     The instrumentation room of 130 foot super yachts fascinated me. I absorbed the silence and drank in the scent of the finest Italian leather and polished mahogany.  I was hypnotized by precision movements of instruments recording atmospheric pressure changes, everything  pristine, museum quality, to inform one of such powerful forces. Each shift registered, although it couldn’t be controlled.

     My new mind is like that. I can’t control some things but when I get erratic read outs I can seek safe harbour. When I see crazy, cross the road.

     Edmund was always gone, and grasses, growing higher around our breeze block village home, were wet with morning dew. They partially hid the boat behind our house. Not a dingy. A boat that looked like a toy boat to scale, when carried on the side of a yacht  the length of half a football field, owned by the Aga Kahn or Trump, in the 80’s.

     It was white, and gathering water, algae lines forming at seat level. Edmund claimed he had a buyer for $6,000. The same price he’d sell the sat com equipment for.

     I was terrified. Our Dominican maid Elizabeth, whom the boys call Wib a dus and the baby dubbed Wheat a bix, helped me carry boxes of other people’s possessions into the attic, after I rifled through them.

     In a few days, I was calmer, not fearing being jailed, even though a local journalist’s wife had been beheaded, and rumors of gun houses, Israeli training grounds and deals with Noriega were rife.

     I dipped into someone’s new jar of La Prarie, a face lotion I’d always lusted after, stopping my level of indulgence with Clarins and Chanel. There were alligator belts, men’s Italian leather slip ons with tassles. Perfumes, colognes, clothes which Wheat a bix distributed. Watches. And photo albums.

     My voyeuristic tendencies were sated; the investigation into whose clothes and La Prairie, and where they might now be, became work. The house heated up, children clamored for attention, legos were gathered by being swept into dust pans, and the dog barked.    Children were escorted, strolled and carried to the “shop” for a tin of sausages and a grapefruit soda, although most of the time they were fed macrobiotically. I was in deep. And it had to be put away before Edmund returned or the neighbors knocked on the door for tea. I found the clandestine aspect titillating, a drug. What knew I of illicit activities?

     Within three days I had a good grasp of the story, forensically. A woman from Boston was widowed in her thirties. She had two sturdy little brown headed boys to raise on her own. She worked as a dental hygienist, and, evidently had a million dollars worth of life insurance that she wouldn’t touch.

     A construction company landed a big contract in Boston, and the manager, a bigamist, “found” Louise.  Perhaps she cleaned his teeth. Anyway, before long there were pictures of black balloons for her fortieth birthday party, and letters wishing bon voyage to Louise and her fiancé who was taking her for a year to sail around the world.

     She was wild about him. He was strong and sexy and bad, and the pictures whispered about their sex, and how she’d never known it could be like that, and the sex and the desire penetrated her body and mind, and he had complete control of her.

     One letter from a friend intimated concern. Other letters were, “gosh, you are the luckiest woman I’ve ever known.” The other women around always looked animated, just from standing near him. He brought women to their knees with his scent and sardonic side. Actually, scurrilous. But that was to be revealed later.

     Scurry. Scurvy. Limey’s was the name of the restaurant in English Harbour where she often went to write, on the balcony overlooking the bay and the dockyard activity.

     Her cell phone rang. Edmund, on St. Kitt’s.  People in Antigua had waited ten years for a land line, and still no service. First Call, part of Cable and Wireless, could give it to you right away, with, just a contract.

     Sabine had stood on hilltops, a baby in one arm, waving antennas for the towers to search for signal strength. Yet, she didn’t know who Edmund really worked for. She only knew she loved him and her three gorgeous, beautiful, healthy baby boys. She was young. Thirty. What could possibly go wrong.

     Tienneman square was a far away incident. She lived in Sweet’s village where the boys would grow up fishing with home made poles for kali, eating mountain apples and herding goats with locales. The house where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor lived, the plantation, was just beyond the stream, down the hill, closer to the Dark Wood Beach side of Antigua which boasted a beach for everyday of the year.

     The sister agreed to raise the boys of the woman in the albums, Louise, while she circumvented the world on the vast seas, with her lover, soon to be husband. Nothing appeared out of order in the first photo album. The boys were adolescents, 16 and 14. As long as they stayed in their same home and school with the same friends and activities- church and basketball and swim team, they seemed unbothered by their mother’s departure.

     The trouble began almost immediately. An emergency room visit for a broken ankle; hers. The photographs that had letters slipped in behind them showed a face with…fear. Another fall in the galley during big waves led to a broken arm. Sunglasses didn’t always hide black eyes.

     She became very pulled in hardly writing home, just calling the boys when in port, which I knew from the pink slips saved stamped with numbers called, dates and times.

      She didn’t understand the importance or urgency of putting the yacht in his name instead of hers.

     It was her investment, after all, and a good deal, hadn’t he told her that. Did she remember that? Everything was hazy, surreal, no emotional pores open to let the awful truth waft up. That she fucked up. That she abandoned her boys. That her warden was watching her every move, that he had a terrible temper and was heartless. That he never gave a shit about her, and now she could feel no out except to keep hoping, keep denying and sign the boat over to him.

     Even death felt comfortable because the pain would go away and she wouldn’t have to return home with remorse and futility, disappointment personally, and the deeper pain of perceiving her dead husband’s disappointment in her stupid wasteful wrong decisions. She had had a good man. She should have known the difference.

     She should have guessed he was enough of a creep to be a bigamist and to read the obits choosing her long before she knew he did.

     They argued more, her surprisingly standing up, insistently, about why the title of the boat had to be changed. To buy her the diamond she deserved. “That doesn’t matter” she said. It is necessary because of tied up funds from the project manager absconding, in Boston, he told her.

     “What about his other funds” she wrote her brazen words to a friend, in a letter that was never mailed,  but kept tucked between pictures, until I pulled out the words, marks on lined paper torn from a spiral notebook, after her death.

     The pink slip from the Red Hook telephone log showed the funeral home in Boston that handled her husband’s remains was called within ten minutes of the coroner’s time of death. Besides that report, a news story about her drowning was saved in the albums.

     Her ankle was caught in the anchor rope in five feet of clear water in the port. Others came by, according to a news article, but her husband (who is wanted) was putting on his snorkel gear and insisted that he could handle freeing her.  She drowned before he cut the rope.

     I had her La Prarie everything. Skin lifting lotion for the eye area.  Fluid Intensity for the throat. Moisturizing with and without spf.  Bath products. Spritzers.

     Men in the village wear wearing the loafers. I saw one with a hole cut out on the side, on a man with a crooked toe, now exposed. He stood in the queue behind me at Swiss Bank in St. John’s.

     I tried to mail nine of the albums to the attorney listed in one of her notebooks. Edmund stopped me, freaked out when I exited the car with the packages, and we fought as I attempted to shove albums through postal slots. He shouted, waving his arms “Do you want to be arrested and have charges, not to mention pay back the $20,000?”

     “I know how much it would mean to the boys to have these pictures and to know the truth about what happened to their mother.” I cried.

     One day, nearly a month after Edmund threw the albums away, or burned them, I called her attorney on a First Call cell phone. I told him tearfully I tried to mail the albums. He said they knew there was foul play and the boat had been stolen from her and her name forged. It was sold in Curacao.

     I went in the attic and looked in the captain’s log. The last pages were written by a young girl who had had no opportunity, really. An American with not much going for her, young, 19, wrote “I’ve met my knight in shining armor and he is going to take care of me and we will sail around the world in his yacht.

    I thought we ended up with those possessions because Edmund met the owner of storage units at a garden party with a lot of Brits, and an Israeli spy. As the duping unravels, I understand, partially, that the storage unit in Edmund’s name was part of his job. He knew it would be there with the merchandise we received, and more. Whether he worked for the CIA or the Noriega contingency of just business men with little black books who were gun runners and laundered money in Europe, I am not clear. I just know that when the Duping begins to fall away it is like apoptosis, cellular death, for lies upon which lives have been built.

     And as the lies go down the drain, my body concomitantly, grew fistulas to clear out passages for me, swollen up with sorrow for things I didn’t even understand. I, like Louise, loved my man.  And, for a long time, I believed him.

     The unraveling  from what occurred in the Caribbean’s most leeward  island, Antigua, began nearly twenty years after the events. Unduping is as palapable as internal adhesions breaking releasing a gush of fluid that alleviates all pain as the pressure is no more.

     Like levees breaking. “How’d you like your suffering ma’am  hard and fast or slow and easy? You can marry the attorney and let the life flow out like an IV drip, or take your medicine all at once.  I had to sugar coat it back then, too much to accept  that I was married to a two bit hustler con, a cheat and probably gay, with his doctor friend, the Representative from Valdez, and others. That I was married to a liar, who smoked crack with Rastafarians on an island where they broke donkeys’ backs to keep them alive until boats came round to pick them up and sell the meat. It took twenty years to see the truth.

     I didn’t even see it when our entire family was carted off to a Greek jail after Edmund set thousands of acres on fire in Corfu. In the first cab, a four wheel drive cab that could make it down to our rented villa next to Princess Margaret’s, we had a child’s tricycles and 7 of the 14 suitcases, one with linens and my mother’s 25^th anniversary pearls. I was leaving Edmund, but he followed. I wanted to move to Italy, where everyone loves bambinos, they say “Oh pe la la,” and toss them in the air.

     I had yoga connections at La Croce, the children would be tri lingual and I could make monies easily in northern Italy marketing to Americans, getting businesses’ verbiage just right, taking it up a notch or two.

     Edmund followed and kept herding us all further south. Pompeii was great, and I was nearly lulled into complacency, until he held Gambier’s head under the water while shampooing him because Gambier was screaming about his eyes burning. The old veiled widow swept and said “ Pazzo Pazzo” referring to the numerous toy tractors and gizmos lining the porch rather than the psychotic husband. But the boys loved gelattis and the garden of the Fugitives. 

Edmund sneaked them into the coliseum. We saw altars to Apollo where human sacrifices took place. And a multitude of stores which offered three commodities in tall earthen vases. Olive oil, wine, grain. The walls were painted with maenads pursued by Pan figures with large phalluses which brought guffaws from the boys.            Edmund decided it was time to leave by sniffing the air, it seemed. Which made me think even more about the Garden of the Fugitives and what they all must have thought as fire and ash rained down on them, blackening the sky, filling their lungs, leaving them in various poses of collapse.

     Little did I know that we would become fugitives.  Imminently. We’d heard about the dangers of the police in Kerkira, another name for Corfu. The Brits had a local hang, a bar, and published an ex-pat newspaper that spoke of extortion and cruelty, which I had just read the day before our arrest.

     Edmund lit a bonfire to Posiedon, and it spread. He found a pair of red Keds with white shell tops, four inches long. They fit Gambier and he saw stones surrounding trash and lit it, although billboards in seven languages punctuated the island with forest fire warnings and promises of severe fines.

     We had all played on our private beach in front of the villa.  A boat load of tourists arrived, and we hurriedly retreated to our breathtakingly beautiful home for a while, with silver service, antiques and scarlet bouganvillia cascading from the second story balconies.

     We had bought one man’s “gift from the seas,” lobster, and Edmund had roasted a chicken with irish potatoes as well. We made love while the children played, then he left me to nap. The boys and their father rented a paddle boat and headed to an isthmus, across a tiny bay.

     I awakened from the somnambulance induced by wine, Greek food and good sex, and I heard them saying “Daddy made a fire.” The boys’ eyes were suddenly reminiscent of the pictures in roadside boxes marking healing sites where saints had appeared and restored vision. Wide eyed and silent. A terrible roaring, like a huge waterfall was outside the 12 foot oak doors. I was discombobulated, all nature topsy turvy. Edmund was shaking, which he never did, and handing over $17,000, all we had left, saying “I’m going to a Greek jail.”

     When the doors were opened all I saw was gold, red, Pentecostal tongues of fire usurping the island, and smoke.

     “I’ll take Daniel and you take the other boys; you may have to tread water.” Edmund said. “There’s a little known fire break and if I head straight up there, we have a chance” he stated, as if it were a potential game plan to head off with my firstborn into flames ten, fifteen twenty feet tall which appeared to surround us. It became more and more surreal and life threatening and our situation appeared hopeless, even if we didn’t burn to death.

“You’re the faster runner.  Run to the sales office and tell them the fire has scared us and we want our money back for the rest of the month” Edmund implored.

     I ran, but my muscles were so tight, and it wasn’t just the lack of available oxygen. I was scared. Scared about treading water gauging the swim toward Albania. Scared that somehow Edmund had done it and I didn’t understand. I heard Gambier say “Daddy lit a fire to Poseidon” and Daniel said “Yes, and now it is…everywhere.”

     The people on the beach having their afternoon of volleyball and ouzo stared at me with black medallion eyes, decidedly un saint like, and I felt the meaning of culpable, although I was only napping. How could this have happened?

     The sales person asked if I knew who started the fire. She said there was no refund. I wondered if Edmund was crazier than I imagined and was trying to kill my children and himself while I was away, or what.

     I had just been through a head spinning three days with his change, his epiphany, causing my trophe, from leaving him to thinking I would be the wife of a televangelist.

     What I didn’t consider was that I’d be the wife of a fire monger sociopath.   I had accepted the wife of televangelist gig, as all women from my tribe accept that which we weave, when our faith is…re-ignited. Only this time I sure wish it had been ignus fatus, a false fire.

     I began the trek back, fear coursing through my veins. And from that time, through the arrest and the witnessing of evening ablutions and women beating rugs through  tiny chinks in the concrete prison bathroom wall, through telling Daniel to watch after this brothers in a Greek orphanage, I never once questioned the veracity of Edmund’s word.

     I believed that he had had an epiphany swimming in the Aegean after drinking all night with mysterious men in dark suits in the hotel bar, and that he did know things, and that he was spiritual and that I was married to a man who would inevitably become a famous televangelist.

     And in one sweep of unduping, even that fell away.

     I went to the bar in order to ask him to come help with the over exhausted children. The business men, or CIA contacts with instructions, were gone, and so was Edmund.

     He came to our room at 9 a.m. and quickly became unconscious. We had to turn in the rental, so I pulled him up and led him to the car at 11:00 a.m. He saw a beach as we drove. He stopped the car, and impulsively swam out, a half mile in frigid waters, as a handful of German tourists watched. He became a tiny dot in the sea. Thirty minutes late he appeared, and half swam half loped out of the Aegean.

     He advanced, taking large strides, crying. “Exstasis.” I tried to link what was happening with our visit the day before to the Asian Museum of Art. I was certain it was a beautiful healing moment. An epiphany necessary for a televangelist.

     He cried, openly, with largesse, about Simon Grace, his friend, who died of AIDS. He swam to purify himself, and spoke of Simon. And thus began his manic phase that lasted for three days began.

      On the third, as it was wearing off, he burned a sizeable chunk of the island, scarring Corfu for many square miles.

 He had been slipping away from knowing everything. He wasn’t making love to me hard, against the wall of chicken coops. But, as women who weave do, I still had faith. Now, as I pull the drain closed below the spigot in my bath, I see, twenty years later, that Edmund was a charlatan. Better word, that Edmund was a puppet for the CIA, contras/ cocaine/ murderous regimes, or that Edmund like Briar was, a closet gay criminal, or at least swung both ways, whichever was most useful, and that his good looks and charm, i.e., sociopathism helped him easily establish himself in the world of subterfuge and corruption.

     I didn’t get until…yesterday that I had been, twenty years earlier, wife of sodomized drunk guy who did massive amounts of ice or speedballs and had a psychotic break in the  Aegean. I didn’t get until…yesterday that he cried about his dead gay lover, the same one who must have given him that bad ass case of non-specific urethritis that he swore wasn’t herpes until I got meningitis and PID from a sexually transmitted disease.   We lived outdoors on Molokai, and my inguinal lymph gland grew as big and as hard as a hermaphrodite with a hard on.

But my concerns about his sexual alignment pale when I consider that he was an operative and knew absolutely everything I heard murmurings about- gun houses and barge loads of cocaine, Israeli spy training grounds, and murder. He was a part. And I knew nothing.

     That storage unit was ready and waiting for Edmund to hit the island. That storage unit owner at the party the Brits gave, was as in the know as  conservative party leaders in the UK who  of course known that the British government along with Rio Tinto own all the yellowcake uranium in Iran, in partnership with Iran. The very country they join the U.S. in chastising for refining, Iran, they also profit share from the same downstream manufacturing. Wink wink.

     It was all smoke and mirrors, and Edmund had been hired to secure the deal, or maybe it was his due to his father’s clout, who had been a Royal Ambassador of the British Empire or his grandfather, who had been a tea baron in India.

     Edmund was kicked out of his family home at age sixteen after attending St Cuthbert’s. He lived on the streets of the “London of the north,” Newcastle before heading to the States.

    And, in Antigua, Edmund was invited to a garden party of spooks and CIA gun runners and it took me twenty years to peer through the deception.    

Edmund met all the yachties. Edmund was in charge of all communication.  Edmund knew where to sail to or stand on the island to make your fax machines or cell phone work. Edmund negotiated with leaders of tiny island nations.

Edmund was never around, and like my friend, the wife of the real estate developer, I was too busy raising kids to really examine it any deeper.     

    So, I believed Edmund. I believed he was going to be a famous televangelist who God revealed secrets to, and I would be the next Tammy Faye Baker minus the eyelashes and dog house replicas of our West coast mansion.

     I wasn’t into the money as much as I was seduced by the fantasy of my man knowing the mind of God. 

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