EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

Monday noontimes at the nursing home I got to feed Auntie Fran and as I waited for her to open her mouth, and chew, and swallow if she felt like swallowing that day, I’d watch what went on around us.

Mostly I watched Edna, tall and big-boned, with wispy hair.

“Girl! What time is it, girl?” she asked me once. “That poor soul,” she added, indicating another with a nod of her head. “She’s touched, you know!” I really liked Edna. “I’m going out for a smoke, where’s my purse?” she would say, just as if she could leave that locked Alzheimer unit, just walk on out whenever she liked. She carried that small black purse with her everywhere. Once I saw her bring it to the dining room and put it in the trash. Later in the meal she became agitated.

“Where’s my tea?“ she kept saying.

“Right here,” said the nurse’s aide.

“No! My TEA! ” she exclaimed, looking now under the table.

“Is this it?” I asked, going to the trash and fetching forth her purse. “Yes!”

Later, she spilled her actual tea and saw the erratic shape the spill made on the tiles. “Girl!” She hailed me. “There’s a chicken on the floor here!”

In time, Edna fell permanently quiet, as sooner or later they all fell quiet on this ward.

She was 98  by the time she died and to tell teh truth she was almost  bald. The wisps didn’t look like they had ever grown on her actual scalp. She had that big old dress like the oldest of my old people: two ancient great aunties born in the 1860s. She had that salty way of theirs too, and when  she finally died I cut out her obituary and carried it in my wallet til smudged into illegibility and came apart like kleenex.

Bryan just added a comment to what I wrote about him a few days ago but since it’s sort of too ‘buried’ under all the other comments I’m going to put it up here too, as a posting.

Again this is my former student and valued friend who in my book came back from the dead, thanks to the 12 Steps and the daily discipline of self reflection and self scrutiny:

Hi Terry: I’m writing in response to the story you printed about the way God led me to ‘randomly’ meet someone I had needed to make amends to for a long time. As heady and intoxicating to my ego having the story printed was, there were other more important lessons learned here, for me.

The story didn’t end there, at Bentley’s, in that line, behind that guy, that day: Paul and I met two days later in my office. I was able to apologize for my behavior, after all those years. We agreed on a dollar figure for the car, $3,500, and I wrote him a check for $1,000, agreeing to pay the rest in monthly installments.

I encountered fear again before writing the check. I had had a couple of customers, earlier that month, not pay me what they owed me. My initial thoughts were to use that as an excuse to either not pay Paul or to give him a much smaller check. But, that fear was quickly removed too and I made a “good demonstration” giving him nearly 1/3 of the amount we had agreed on. I was amazed that as I handed him the check, that all the financial fear was gone.

Then I asked Paul for his mailing address, so I could send monthly installments, and he said ” No. Why would you want to mail me the checks, when we could just see each other once in a while and you could give me the installments in person”.

Again, I was dumbfounded. I asked him ” Why would you want to see me once in a while, instead of getting the checks in the mail?”

He said, ” Because you’re a good guy. Why wouldn’t I want to see you?”

I still didn’t fully understand. Why would anyone I had treated so poorly ever want to see me again?

We’ve been out riding twice since that weekend. And I got a call from him today to come and look at some houses he’s building, to give him  quotes for installing the heat and air conditioning, which, as you know, is what I do.

Paul’s reaction to me throughout this whole thing has amazed me. I expected nothing but bitterness and anger, but he’s been just the opposite. I have a couple of resentments towards a few people I feel owe me amends from the past. I wonder if I would greet these people with the same compassion, dignity, and willingness to forgive that Paul has demonstrated towards me?

AA’s Big Book teaches us how to make an amend, but Paul has shown me how to receive one and forgive the person making it. If someone came to me to make an ammend, I hope I can behave as Paul has towards me.

There were just so many lessons  to learn, all around this thing.

I read some of the comments people wrote after reading your article and I was truly touched. It seems a lot of people were affected by this story.

I’m just a schmuck who made an amend and told you about it. Then, you told hundreds if not thousands of people by printing it in your article.

Judging by the reactions of those who responded, so many more people were affected by this than just Paul, you, or myself.

There’s a line in a Bruce Springsteen song titled ” Living Proof”. Bruce sings ” I was looking for a little bit of God’s mercy and I found living proof.”

Now, so have I, so has Paul, so have you, and so have your readers.

And we’ve all been changed, by this, just a little bit.

Living Proof.

Love, Bryan (as he looks today)

Make of this what you will: Once, way, way back I was perusing the produce  at the grocery store and came upon a vegetable I did not recognize.“What’s this funny-looking stuff?” I asked an older man who put on such a mad face I felt like his kid coming home with a disappointing report card. “They’re beets!” he snapped. “What, you never saw beets before?”Then he hurried  away in case such stupidity might be catching.

“Oh! I… I… I.. just didn’t know,” I called after him. “I guess we always had beets in a can! I‘m sorry!” Then – maybe he could tell he had me near tears  – he came back over and stood right beside me. “It’s OK,” he said with a whole different demeanor. “You have to ask in life. How else will you learn? You ask! It’s fine. It’s good, really.”

So that was a nice grocery store exchange. I had the other kind yesterday when I was trying to check out:

“Could you please separate out the perishables? “ I said to the kid who was bagging.

“Whaaaat?” the kid said, looking past me and smiling an idiot’s smile at another employee.

“Could put the refrigerator items- “  but he cut me off:  “Uh, dude: I know what perishables are.”

“Sorry! But…. then why did you say ‘What?’

“Whaaaat?”

“You did it again!”

“Oh. uhhh. well I always say What.”

“Well you’d best break yourself of THAT habit or people are going to be mad at you your whole life.”

“NO ONE WILL BE MAD AT ME!” he cried, near tears himself it looked like.

And all I could think walking toward my car was “Gad! Now I’m at an age where I’ve got people crying in the supermarket!” Or maybe we all get emotional there, when we look at those price tags.

Remember that scene at the end of Pretty Woman when the Richard Gere character climbs the fire escape to the call-girl Julia Roberts character and asks her “What happens after the handsome prince rescues the princess?”

“She rescues him write back!” says our Julia and the audience totally gets that because of course her smooth and deceitful Prince has been pretty lost himself.

Listen to this:

When I first met my friend  Bryan he was a chubby-cheeked member of the Advanced Placement English class I taught in my years at Somerville High School. Well a lot has happened in Bryan’s life since those schoolboy days: He went from Boston to Florida by way of California as the saying goes, meaning he made mistakes that even led to his being incarcerated, all because of addiction that proved as hard to cut through as the super-tough ligaments that tie the arm to the torso.

Lucky for us both the 12 Steps came along. One day well into his journey toward recovery he and I did a prison ministry show called Gates Unbarred together and as I was taking him back to the Pre-Release, he told me I should go to meetings myself. He said this because he saw in me what I never saw in myself: that as a result of alcoholism in my family of origin I had terrible boundaries and exhibited the kind of ‘rescuing’ behavior that almost never helps anybody and dearly costs not only the person practicing it but those with the closet claims on that person.

Today Bryan owns his own very successful business, goes to the VA a couple of times a month to talk with the guys there who are ‘in program’ and flat-out loves singer-songwriter Lori McKenna,  one of whose tunes caused him to have to pull over the first time he heard it on his car radio and weep tears for pain so old he did not until then know its name.

Without saying more let me show you the letter he wrote me ten days ago which I have excerpted as this week’s column and which he says he is happy to have me copy here in unedited form. I titled the column “What Recovery Looks Like” but privately I think of it as “Bryan: May He Speak at My Funeral”:

Dear Terry: So how was your long weekend? Were you up north? I went to Maine on the bike all by myself to visit my Aunt Polly,  my father’s sister. Stopped in York Beach to see the twins do you remember them? It was me, Ricky & Robby. Joe, Peter and Yuri all through junior high and high school. Their family has a house in York Maine and we all spent summers up there.

Here’s a story: In 1984 when I first started going to meetings, my first sponsor was a guy Paul. This was before I even started going to AA. We were going to Cocaine Anonymous back then. I only stayed sober a year and half that first time. Me and Paul stayed friends though. He was a good guy, a contractor, and he always helped me out.

In 1988 I was really declining and I needed a car. I had totaled mine. I conned Paul into buying me a car. He bought me a brand new 1988 Ford Escort, he registered it and insured it and I was supposed to give him the payments. Since I was using at the time, I was always a month behind paying him. His car was the car I did those armed robberies in and since the car was registered to him, the police initially went to his house with guns out in front of his kids, the whole nine yards. He told them I had the car and that’s when they came and got me.

He took the car back, I went to jail and never saw or heard from him again.

He’s been on my amends list for a long time. I heard 10 yrs ago, he had moved to North Carolina.

Fast forward to Saturday. I’m leaving my Aunt’s house in Biddeford and I stop for gas with the bike. This couple also on a bike at the next gas pump start talking to me, asking where I’m from, was I enjoying the riding? they asked me if I’d been to this biker bar/restaurant down the road called Bentley’s. I told them I hadn’t. They were like “Oh, you have to go. It’s wild, all the biker’s go there, the food is good. Then this other guy at the next pump in a car starts telling me “Ya, you have to go there” Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now I feel like I’m in a Twilight Zone episode where I’ve gotten off the main road and everyone is a little “too” friendly.

The other couple finally talked me into going and following them there. We pull in, I’m completely overwhelmed. There must have been 300 bikes there. Bikers, biker chicks, regular people everywhere. It’s a huge place with like 4 bars. They had a mechanical bull, a big bar-b-q pit. Hundreds of people all over the place. I’m all alone, overwhelmed, in a place I had no intention of going to, brought here by two strangers I didn’t know.

I go get some food and I’m walking around with my plate, just taking it all in. I get in line at one of the four bars to get a coke. I’m standing in line waiting and there’s this guy in front of me with his back to me. He calls over to the bartender and I recognized his voice instantly.

It was Paul. My first impulse was to walk away, but I knew I had been led to this very spot for a reason. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around.

I said ‘Hi Paul.’

He’s looking at me not remembering me and he says ‘Do I know you Friend?’

I said ‘Ya, you do Paul, it’s Bryan.’

He looked at me for a few seconds then he remembered me. He goes ‘Bryan! Is that you? how are you. What happened to you? How ARE you?’ I was expecting ‘You piece of shit, you fucked me over and you owe me for that car.’

I caught him up on my life. He caught me up on his. I noticed he was kind of buzzed and he was drinking. I got his number and told him I needed to call him when he wasn’t drinking and make amends to him, including financial amends for the car.

Before we parted, I told him ‘Paul, you were a good guy and I took advantage of that. I just want you to know you were a good guy to me.’

In the midst of all these bikers and all that was going on around us, I saw his face just crack and he started to cry. I don’t think anyone had told him he was a good guy in a while. I knew exactly how that felt and how he felt.

There were three gas stations at that intersection. Why did I choose that one? Why did I talk to those strangers? I never do that. Why did they talk to me, plus the guy in the car. No one ever just talks to me. I wasn’t going to follow them, but I looked over and they were waiting for me.I could have just drove off. There were four bars at this place, why did I end up at that bar in that line, behind that guy?

Today I drove back up to York in my car and sat down with Ricky (Robby had to leave) and I made amends to him too for not having been a better friend, for leaving the group and blaming them all these years like they had abandoned me. In reality, I abandoned them for drugs, my crazy lifestyle and being a criminal going to jail. Out of that whole crew, I’m the only one not still in the loop.

My whole adult life I’ve felt the loss of those guys. They knew me, they really knew me. In a way that no one, since, has ever known me. Until I became someone they didn’t know anymore.

I blamed them for not caring enough to save me. But, how can anyone save you from yourself?

I was looking at this Labor Day weekend as a sad end to a summer alone. I guess God didn’t have self pity in the game plan for this weekend.  But, I started finding myself again after a very long time.

There’s a line in the first Lori McKenna song I ever heard called “Boston By Friday:  ‘I lost a lover, but found my best friend.’ I’ve always known that the  best friend that was being referred to in that song was  me-myself.

Love, Bryan

Bryan in 1984

On September 11th of last year I posted a piece based on the image of people jumping from another tall building. I wrote it in 2002 with the memory fresh in my mind of that footage  by those French brothers who were hoping to make a documentary about the firehouse right there in Lower Manhattan. Of course they too ended up racing to Ground Zero and the images they captured show how dazed and helpless the firefighters look as they stand in the lobby of Tower One trying to assess the situation. Then the bodies start dropping and the elderly chaplain begins looking disoriented as well as dazed and the next thing you know he’s being carried out, dead of heart failure. I found a little of this footage on YouTube and I’ll post it below.

It was the sound of their falling that I couldn’t forget – until I read that Robert Pinsky poem about the people almost a hundred years ago who also jumped to avoid the flames. That was the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire of 1911 and the dead, young women mostly, had been locked in at their machines, company policy.

Strangely enough, it comforts you to read the poem. I keep my piece about it at the top of my home page here. It used to be what I thought of whenever I thought of this awful day. Now I also think of the two people David and I knew who died there and how almost a full year later they found a credit card belonging to one and a little finger belonging to another. And I also think for all we might do wrong here in America, what other country would spend more than a year moving 16 acres of ash and rubble, then sifting, sifting, sifting and doing the careful DNA work too, all so that the families of the victims  might someday have some peace?

In my latest column I said that though the Olsen twins looked like sad baby monkeys when they were little, now they look like lemurs. Lemurs or meerkats. ‘Course you have to be careful when you characterize people this way not just because it’s mean and you’re revealed as a jerk but because the fans of the made-fun-of will be all over you in a heartbeat.

For example a long time ago I was writing about Elizabeth Taylor and had the nerve to say that at least ONE of her chins was still pointy and instantly here came a letter by an outraged lady sent in to me from one of the papers where my column appears.

“Where do YOU get off?” she wanted to know. “I see your picture. Your eyes are squinty, your hair is out of style and your teeth look false!” I liked that quote so much I put it on the cover of my first book.

But hey, you know what, at least in my picture I’m smiling – AND I have normal amount of body fat. Look at this waif from the same issue of the magazine that has Meerkat Ashley on the cover. Plus is it just me or does she look just a little simple-minded ?

Our English friend Malcolm is a dry fellow, which is one reason we like him so much. His wife  Penny turned from her gardening in late June to see a big momma bear standings some 30 feet away. Here below is a note Malcolm posted, some of which is from a website about bear attacks. He has it on the fridge of their summer cottage where we ate last night and since our summer cottage is just a couple of coves away, I  can tell that it sure put a renewed fear of sleepwalking into THIS little camper!

“Black Bears: for the first time in ten years, we’ve seen black bears on our property (as of June 2009).  Multiple sightings of one family, with two cubs, in our driveway, between the house and the tennis court, in the woods, up the street, etc.  So be alert if you’re outside.  You don’t want to find yourself close to the cubs, or come across the bears unexpectedly.  In general, if you’re walking outside, stay alert and make plenty of noise.  These bears are not large ones, and look like big hairy dogs from a distance, but should be left well alone.  They can run 30-40mph for short distances, and climb trees quicker than you.  You don’t want them paying attention to you.

“What to do if you come across a bear:

• If you see it and it is unaware of you, stay quiet and move away in the opposite direction.
• If it is already aware of you, speak calmly and move your arms (this helps them identify you as a human, because they have poor eyesight).  The bear will most likely move away from you.
• If not, walk away from it, keep on talking calmly.
• If the bear charges, it is usually a bluff charge first, just to see if you’ll back off.  Back off in a deliberate fashion.  Don’t run.  Avoid direct eye contact.  Pick up a stick.
• If it actually attacks you, fight ferociously. If you’re losing, curl up on the ground in fetal position, with hands covering the back of your neck, a vulnerable area. And, as the Americans say, enjoy!”

Coupla days ago someone left a giant Homer Simpson doll on my steps with an anonymous note reading “Has anyone seen my underwear?” I guess because when not going on and on about Ted Kennedy here last week I also wrote about how I had to cheat and lie my way back into Weight Watcher’s because I was starting to look like Simpson in my underpants.

This week my column is on Fall Fashions and Shopping and all, a rich vein for satire if ever there was one and between the  fun I had researching that and playing with my new doll I got the idea to dig out the ugliest pair of panties I own Victoria Secret or not, and put them on old Homer. Then too the guy at the hardware store and I were talking bras the other day and he asked me what they cost. “I grit my teeth and lay down 80 bucks a pop, “ I told him. “If you need a bra you need a good bra.”

Now I don’t know if you’d say Homer needs a BRA exactly… Anyway here he is, my alter ego pal a few hours ago, braless still but otherwise armed with his Vicki-Secret bikinis and ready take on the day!