mary’zine random redux: #10 January 2001

March 18, 2009

With this issue, I boldly go where I never thought I could go before—into the XXX Zone. I have a hard time talking about sex. I have never used the word “masturbation” in 8 years of therapy. I’m no Betty Dodson or Suzie Bright. But this ‘zine is my place to explore, and you are the lucky recipients of my intrepid findings.

Those who do not wish to enter the XXX Zone may proceed directly to Story #2, which is considerably more decorous and in which the word “nipple” does not appear even once. Ha! I dare you to skip over it now.

mary’s first porno

As I sit here at the computer, wondering where to start, I ponder the title of this story for a while, and it occurs to me that I have unconsciously made an association between sexuality and childhood—Mary’s first steps, Mary’s first word, Mary’s first porno—and I suppose that is accurate after all. Before you get too scandalized, let me just state that I’m referring to watching a porno, not starring in one (…as if…).

I had my first sexual experiences at the age of 10, at the hands of my older cousin John. It’s hard to put myself back in that time and understand why I couldn’t refuse, why I couldn’t tell anyone. But like many other things that had happened to me, this unwanted attention was like a fact of life, like a death or an illness. It wasn’t something I chose, and therefore I had no choice.

Something was awakened in me by those encounters in the woods, the basement, and our “fort” on the sand hill, but not in the sense of the handsome prince awakening the beautiful princess with a kiss. It was an awakening of fear, guilt, shame, and pleasurable physical sensation in a mixture that was most confusing. The way I found to deal with the confusion was to try to separate the pleasure from the rest of it—or to own my own body, if you want to get feministic about it.

This new awareness of my lower body morphed into inspired masturbation under the very noses of my grade school classmates and teachers. The large institutional swing set at Grant School had fine, sturdy poles, up which I climbed like the boys—humping my way slowly and deliciously to the top, then sliding down after climax—instead of the dainty swinging back and forth on the underside of the pole that the girls were supposed to do, all work and no play whatsoever. The bell to end recess would ring, the other kids would go running, and Miss Magnuson, the second grade teacher, would call up to me from the ground, “Come now, Mary!” And so I did.

When the swing set was no longer a viable option—“When I was a child, I humped like a child, but when I became a woman, I put away childish things”—it took me years to realize that there were other means to accomplish the same end and even books to help you do it. When it comes to erotic materials, I have always been more a fan of the written word than the visual image. I have had little enough exposure even to the written word (I mean, those written words). My first awareness of pornography was finding my father’s hidden copy of Nudist Holiday when I was 10 or 11. I can’t imagine why my mother let him keep it—my father lost all property rights after he got sick with MS—unless—oh, horrors—it was hers. The book was pretty soft-core. I remember the bobbing breasts of the ubiquitous volleyball players—do real nudists love this sport above all others, or is that a smutty-book and movie cliché?—but I don’t remember any big swinging members or anything that truly shocked me.

Recently I had cause to contact a woman-friendly sex appliance store in San Francisco called Good Vibrations. I found it on the Web when I was forced to replace my Hitachi Magic Wand after the cord became frayed and started emitting little sparks. An ex-girlfriend had given it to me some 13 years before, so you know it was ready for the scrap heap. Whenever I succumbed to an onanistic session—staring death by electrocution in the face—I imagined the humiliation of being found dead in my bed days later with the foot-long accidental-suicide weapon in one hand and Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden in the other. I could only hope that my spirit would be long gone by then and wouldn’t still be hanging around the ceiling looking down on the body, watching its surprised friends and family get an eyeful. At least I don’t indulge in any really strange practices, like autoasphyxiation or dressing up in women’s clothes.

When the Wand arrived (I wonder if the Hitachi Corp. really thinks people are using this thing to massage their backs and shoulders?), I looked through the catalog that came with it and noticed that they also sell videos. I figured it was time to satisfy my curiosity about—oh, one thing and another—so I pored over the descriptions and finally settled on a bisexual video called “Curious?”:

Two attractive same-sex couples living under the same roof wonder what it would be like to succumb to their curiosity and swap partners. Enjoy steamy gay and lesbian sex, a woman learning blowjob techniques from a gay man, and a not-to-be-missed four-way in which one of the men becomes the center of everyone’s attention.

I thought, naively, that a video featuring gay men and lesbians would be kinder and gentler, more wholesome somehow, than your usual porno. Obviously, I didn’t think this through. For one thing, it doesn’t get more down-and-dirty than two guys getting it on (despite the fruity-fairy stereotypes), and I had forgotten that pornos showing women together are made to satisfy the fantasies of straight men, not your Birkenstock-wearin’ middle-aged wimmin-lovin’ wimmin. One of the women in this video was named Candy Apples, which should have been my first clue. For viewers with no imagination, the two parts of her name were tattooed on her chest, one above each… apple.

Now that I think of it, I’m not even sure who would want to watch this mishmash of gay, lesbian, and straight sex. Gay men and straight women wouldn’t be interested in the bulbously breasted women, and straight men and lesbians wouldn’t care to see the Long Dong Silvered men… leaving, I supposed, the true bisexuals and those, like me, who are indeed curious or just confused.

So why did I select the bisexual video? I am quite ambidextrous in my sexual response—it’s only emotionally that I walk the gay and narrow—so I admit I was interested in seeing some “towering columns of stiff male meat,” as the women in Nancy Friday’s books like to say. I mean, I’ve experienced my share of said columns, but it’s been awhile. Not everyone knows this, but I’ve been around the block with several penii. In the days before I knew that women were an option, I fooled around a fair bit with the boys but never found one who could begin to intrigue or attract me intellectually or emotionally the way legions, scores, and oodles of women have in my life. Talk about your Mars and Venus. I’m a same-planet girl.

***
[Hetero sidebar] In my 20s, I was naïve enough to believe in the so-called sexual revolution, so when I was first seeing P, I also got involved with two married male librarians. And an unmarried one, if you count my boss, the library director, who got me drunk one night and tried to seduce me, insisting that he knew “gay ways of making love.” He later fired me, but we didn’t know about sexual harassment back then. One of my fondest hetero memories (ah, I am a real woman, after all) was the night the two married men faced off like two stags in the log cabin I was living in. C drove me home after an after-hours rendezvous in the library, and J followed us from town and burst through the door in a jealous rage. I’m glad handguns weren’t readily available back then (at least to librarians). I just sat there, the helpless damsel, in my gay-liberation-button-festooned army shirt, flabbergasted and pleased at this rare display of machismo on my behalf. (No, I can’t explain why I was messing around with these guys. It was the “sixties”; we were insane.)

At the ripe old age of 40, I became temporarily enamored of an older man—a VIP in the Krishnamurti crowd in Ojai, Calif. My 12-year relationship with P had ended, and I guess I figured it was time to sow some wild oats. I didn’t realize right away that what I was enamored of was feeling “normal” out in the world. I loved being seen with a man, going to restaurants with him, walking down the street. It was like suddenly being admitted to an exclusive club. Was I imagining that I was treated entirely differently, that I was receiving the respect and nonchalant approval I had never felt as a dyke? It was a heady experience, to say the least. It almost seemed worth it to “switch,” even though this man turned out to be emotionally cruel and very conflicted about women. Also, he’d had a lifelong problem with impotence—I mean, not occasionally, but completely. I don’t think he had ever really “done it.” I figured this was fate’s way of confirming that I wasn’t meant to go down that path.

***
Back to the porno. As soon as the video arrived, I rushed to put it in the VCR. Frankly, I was stunned, right from the beginning. The video started out with several minutes of ads for male/male 900 numbers and lurid close-ups of men’s frontal and rearal anatomies. I still had hopes that the “story” would provide more titillation—was it too much to hope for a little subtlety, a little eroticism?—and less of an anatomy lesson.

I hadn’t really expected the acting to be any good, but I was frankly astounded to see how bad and insincere it was. They stumbled their way woodenly through the dialogue necessary to move the two guys from the top of the washing machine and the two girls from the bathtub into the joint living space where they could satisfy their “curiosity” about the mysteries of hetero love. But what shocked me was that they couldn’t even act the sex very well. They didn’t seem to be feeling anything. I’m not talking about emotionally, but sexually. The guys wore stoic (or bored) faces—presumably, they were thinking about dead puppies or stock quotes in order to keep going—and had very little dialogue, but “Yeah baby, get your lipstick all over that baby” was a mood killer for sure.

And the women were so obviously faking it, it wasn’t even funny. I mean, it was funny. It was as if they started with a crashing orgasm and then just kept it going and going—move over, Energizer bunny. But since their enthusiasm was not even slightly credible, there was nowhere for it to go. You had to wonder if they were feeling anything at all, or if they had become completely desensitized by the constant manipulation of their parts and their faked over-the-top reactions. There was absolutely nothing sexy about these women, who are supposedly the ultimate sex objects, the ones stamped and approved by scores of porno-loving men. I really had to wonder, What kind of lesbian am I? I love women’s bodies! I find them endlessly fascinating and smooth and curvy and juicy. But if the women in the video were giving and receiving any pleasure whatsoever, you could have fooled me. And it wasn’t just the “lesbian” scenes—the women in the hetero bits acted exactly the same—all over-the-top fakiness.

So if the women were laughable with their feigned horniness, the men were a turnoff because of too much information—testicles hanging out of a guy’s pants like elephant ears; a beer-can-sized penis inserting itself quiveringly into a puckering a-hole. I suppose the organs erecti were impressive enough, but somehow the microscopic detail and the zealous slurping and handling—not to mention 5 solid minutes of the same camera angle—made the action seem about as sexy as bobbing for rubber wieners.

I’m not saying I want the soft romantic lighting, the thin white curtain stirring in the breeze, a bird flying high in the sky to represent the “culmination of the act.” I’m not a prude. But for me, the visuals are just not stimulating—whereas the words—the lick, the flick, the nipple and the clit—ahh. Give me something to dream on. Are you with me, dear reader?

Now that I’ve seen “Curious?,” I no longer am—curious, that is, And I’m more in the dark than ever about who would want to see extreme close-ups of men licking each other’s anuses and gigantic-fakily-breasted women moaning over each other’s shaved mounds—not to mention switcheroos in the middle of the action, so that the women are licking the… and the men are moaning over the….

And I can’t get those images out of my head. You know how they say that if you ever see how sausage is made, you’ll never eat it again? Well, that’s how I feel… not only about the sausage but about the biscuits, if you know what I mean. Oh, and the gravy—especially the gravy. It’s as if someone waved the Magic Wand and worked its magic in reverse. The fairy dust has disappeared, and my Hitachi is once more a mundane reliever of muscle tension, not a means of self-pleasure and delightful fantasy. I cry for my lost innocence.

And now, for something completely different…

just one

For some reason, I like to take myself out to lunch or dinner after a therapy or dreamwork session. (“Take myself out” is such a quaint, romantic concept—as if I’m also going to bring myself a corsage, come around to open my car door, and kiss myself sweetly at the end of the evening.) (Given what you have just read, this might not seem so far-fetched.) It’s as if the inner work and the relationship with J or J* make me want to open to the world, or as if I’m already open and there’s nothing for it but to go out among the human, letting myself seep into their consciousness and take them into mine.

On this particular day, I’ve had a wonderful time with J*, batting back and forth the dream images I’ve offered him out of the dozens I’ve written down since I saw him last. He does most of the batting, hitting multiple home runs. (Though if we’re “batting them back and forth,” I suppose a badminton metaphor would be more appropriate here…. Oh, never mind.) He modestly calls himself a “master of the obvious,” but if so, then it’s clear that pointing out the obvious to those who would otherwise never notice it is a particular form of genius.

Both J* and his wife have become avid readers of the ‘zine, so that adds another dimension to the relationship. They are so enthusiastic, in fact, that I feel myself turning red, wanting to disavow their praise like too-rich chocolate. I ache to hear it and yet it is a bit hard to swallow. I reflexively want to turn their words away at the door, like beautifully dressed partygoers who must have the wrong house. I imagine it’s like being praised for the sweetness of intelligence of your child—you blush to be receiving all this credit for something you’re not sure you’re responsible for, but you also marvel, “So—is that how my little one is received out in the world? Honey, I barely know ye!”

It’s 5:00 when I leave the house on Pleasant Lane—aptly named, because the street feels like a veritable boulevard of pleasantness as I walk to my car, full of feeling and torn between wanting to share it and keep it all to myself. This is where the bustling café comes in—a place where I can sit with a glass of wine and a small pizza or dish of pasta and dream over the insights of the past hour and a half—but at the same time feel the pulse of connection with the world.

I decide on Il Fornaio. It’s still early, so there should be plenty of room for my party of just-one, and it’s a relatively benign environment in which to experience that peculiar luxury-slash-torture which is dining out alone.

Despite my glow from the session, I feel as false and brittle as a mannequin walking down the row of tables behind the beautiful hostess, all the eyes of the other diners seemingly on me instead of on her deserving countenance. She first tries to seat me at the table right opposite the kitchen door, but I’ve been stuck there before. When you dine out alone, you learn to be suspicious of the host’s first choice of seating. I’m there to have a sensory experience in a refined atmosphere, and the comings and goings of the waiters in all their raucous camaraderie through a constantly swinging door are not part of my plan. Instead, I successfully negotiate for a table a little farther along, where I can keep my back to the help and pretend that I am far, far above the mechanics of dinner delivery.

Throughout the perusing of the menu, the ordering of the wine and salad and pizza margherita—grateful to the Italian waiter for instantly seeing them I am a Madame and not a Sir—I feel like a new immigrant to these shores who has only learned to say one phrase, “Thank you.” The thank yous necessary when dining out alone add up to a veritable chorus of gratitude. And because you’re not conversing with another person in between, all you hear yourself say all night long is thank you, thank you, thank you—for the table, the menu, the placing of the order, the bringing of every little thing, the taking away, the bill—as if riches are being bestowed upon you in exchange for your gracious presence rather than $37.48.

When I’m alone in a restaurant, I take self-consciousness to dizzying heights. My self inflates to take up the entire, vaulted dining room—crouching at the high ceiling, pushing against the windows, seeping under the doors, seeming to need a larger venue, the Oakland Coliseum, perhaps, to contain it. It is impossible to believe—as I know must be true—that all eyes are not on me, that judgmental glances are not taking in the falsity of my nonchalance and the obvious pose of bringing along a book to populate the tabletop. It’s a good book, actually—Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life—but who can concentrate on written words when the outsized dimensions of the fearful ego are expanding to fill the vacuum that Nature and solitary diners abhor.

Thank God for the vino. I have nervously drunk almost the whole glass while waiting for my food, and the nice waiter asks if I want a second one with my meal—sparing me the humiliation of craning my neck in obvious alcoholic dependency as I wave down any passing busboy for more liquid courage.

The salad, when it comes, helps to focus my attention a bit, but then there’s the problem of how to hold the book in one hand and navigate the slippery pieces of lettuce and shaved parmesan with the other.

Slowly, slowly, I begin to deflate back to a manageable size. It’s probably the wine, but also, I’ve decided I want to write about this experience, this spiritual practice of sitting quietly in full public view, a “single,” a “just one?” among the paired and partying humans. The writer’s detachment comes in handy sometimes. No social experience is so awkward that it can’t be turned into a good story.

My neck and shoulders begin to loosen a bit, and I dare to take my eyes off my book and look around the room. I’m not interested in the couples or the parties of four (two couples—twice as uninteresting). Pairing is such good camouflage—allowing one to direct all the bonhomie and cheerful chatter at one’s disposal to a safe face sitting opposite, knowing that you have nothing to prove, you are accompanied by your own raison d’être. You each have an other, one who consented to be in your presence for the course of a meal. I’m not knocking it—I prefer eating with a friend, too, and basking in the companionship and the security of bringing along a flesh-and-blood person, nothing so obviously forced as a book.

My attention wanders farther and farther afield. I am really getting bold now. I look over to my right, and I see a young woman sitting alone at a table set for 10. Logically, she must feel 10 times as self-conscious as I do, because all sorts of questions are raised by her being there, surrounded by what seem like 20 wine glasses and a flurry of little plates. She must be waiting for the rest of her party, no? But it looks like some of the glasses have a little wine left in them, as if the party has long since disbanded and she’s frozen there in front of a half-drunk bottle of red, sipping from her glass and twisting a napkin in her lap.

At first I refuse to believe that she is anything but right in her element. She’s attractive, with shoulder-length dark hair, wearing a pretty dress; no one would ever mistake her for a Sir. She probably dines here every night—knows the owner—is married to the owner—is the owner.  But I’m intrigued by the ambiguity of the table settings. Is she coming or going? I’m sitting slightly behind and to her left, so I can gaze at her without being seen (thus confirming my own paranoia—who’s sitting just out of range watching me?).

After several minutes of idly pondering her situation, wondering if her inflated, insecure self is bobbing up at the ceiling along with mine, if she is silently praying for someone else to show up so she doesn’t have to sustain the curious looks from all the safely paired diners—or even those singles who were smart enough to bring a book—I realize that her hands that were twisting the napkin are now rubbing her thighs and making little gestures as if she’s talking to someone. Then I realize her lips are moving! Not animatedly, not like an out-and-out crazy person, but quietly. If I pretend that the rest of the table is populated with her nine companions, it looks like she’s having a conversation with someone across from her. Is she practicing a speech? Is she planning to break up with her boyfriend (under cover of a crowd) or confront a coworker? Or is she out-and-out crazy after all, having called in a reservation for 10 but with only her and nine imaginary friends to fill the chairs?

The waiter comes by and refills the woman’s glass, which she sips at nervously. Or excitedly. How can I know? I don’t. Maybe she’s as self-conscious as I am, or maybe she’s caught up in her own world. Maybe this is the happiest night of her life, and the celebration is about to begin. Or maybe I’m way off, maybe I could never imagine what’s going on with her. It’s as if I’m seeing the mechanics of projection laid bare—as if I can only “put myself in her place” (see her as my twin) or imagine her as my glamorous opposite. In both cases, I am setting myself as the standard, the known, the norm. Maybe we can never see one another true but must always supply the tint, the blush, the coloring from our own bag of makeup. I can’t believe I’m using makeup as a metaphor.

So I can’t size her up, but something about this reassures me. Maybe I’m not so transparent after all. Perhaps, like her, I am obvious only to myself. Obvious because I’m posing as a person of ease—an ugly duckling yearning to be perceived as a cool, gliding swan—like her. Yet as mysterious, in my own way, as any attractive stranger in a pretty dress. I don’t know her story, but if she had been watching me, would she have known mine?

Posing, always posing. Pretending to be OK when we’re not. Even pretending to be OK when we are! Now there’s a pose for you. I was perfectly OK that night—better than OK—but I insisted on feeling like a sore thumb—the girl from the sticks all growed up and just barely learned how to use a fork—the dyke in the telltale haircut—instead of… well, whoever I really am. The simplest lesson—free to be, you and me—seems to be the hardest to learn.

Too much thinking on a full stomach.

When it’s time to leave, I bid a silent farewell to my mysterious counterpart, realizing that I am just one of the multitudes of mysterious, obvious humans—obvious in our pretense sometimes, but mysterious at our core. Saying my last round of thank yous to the tactful waiter and the beautiful hostess, I glide out the door, swanlike, into the dark solitary night, back to my private self.

pookie’s christmas

Pookie is almost impossible to buy for. He turns up his nose at all manufactured “cat toys,” with their trying-too-hard-to-be-fun jingly bells and stale catnip. What does he care if the thing is in the shape of a mouse? It’s not a mouse. A real live spider at least has authenticity.

Pookie can be happy with a piece of cardboard large enough to hold his enormous sprawling self or, better yet, a box, with sides to contain him. Nothing, apparently, makes him feel more secure than a cardboard floor and four little cardboard walls. He is a founding member of the Simple Living movement. Often, I’ll have boxes lying around my office that are way too small for him—like an 8-1/2 x 11 stationery box—but he snuggles in anyway, with his furry flab hanging over all the sides, forcing himself to fit like Cinderella’s stepsister jamming her foot into the glass slipper. But cardboard boxes tend to come serendipitously, you don’t just go out and buy one. Besides, they take up a lot of room. A cute little toy mouse with a jingly bell at least ends up behind the couch, out of sight, out of mind. But a box big enough to hold Pookie is a piece of furniture in itself.

He also used to like chasing wine corks. I would see him crouching behind a chair in the living room, signaling his readiness, and I would throw the cork halfway up the stairs. He would run for it, batting it all the way back down, or—nine times out of ten—knocking it under the stairs, where I would have to crouch down to retrieve it, giving him the perfect opportunity to take a swat at my head from above. I’ve always suspected that that was the real point of the game. But he mysteriously lost interest in cork chasing after his male-to-whatever operation last spring. Better for me and my back, though. And I no longer have to extract stray corks from the vacuum cleaner hose.

Pookie also likes to lick plastic ribbon and lie on tissue paper. After my birthday and Christmas, I used to leave the wrappings on the floor for a few days, for him to pounce on like piles of leaves. But I have banned tissue paper from the house since the time he puked on some orange paper, and the dye stained the light gray carpet right in the middle of the floor. I now have a small round rug covering the evidence, but it’s like Poe’s telltale heart beating under the floorboards, I know it’s there.

I discovered the perfect gift for Pookie when I had to take him to see Dr. Bill because he was drooling. (Pookie, not Dr. Bill.) We never found out why he was drooling, but I had to pay the $54 anyway. And then the drooling stopped. A ruse, apparently, to get inside the doctor’s office and score himself some… tuna-flavored hairball laxative. The stuff comes in a tube, oozing out all brown and shiny, and is licked off the human finger. My human finger. I have to wash and wash my hands afterward like Lady Macbeth. After he’d gotten his first taste, he was after me 24-7 to get more. He lops off a big glob and then has to keep licking and licking the inside of his mouth, trying to get it all down. I entertain myself with the cruel thought, “Got milk?”

When T was staying with me during the painting intensive in December, Pookie would go begging to her for the tuna laxative, too. One day, I heard her talking to him in the next room. “I can’t give you laxative,” she said sweetly, “but I can give you love.”

And that’s what Pookie got for Christmas. Love and laxative, and plenty of it.

[Mary McKenney]

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mary’zine random redux: #2 March 2000

March 16, 2009

Thank you for joining me again here in Mary-land. (Remind me to tell you about the time I worked at St. Mary’s College in St. Mary’s City, Maryland. It was quite an inflating experience, and not just because of the name recognition factor.) The response to mary’zine #1 was so gratifying that I was, of course, terrified when I realized I would have to do it again. Writers are never happy, because either they (a) don’t get the kudos they deserve or (b) get the kudos they deserve and then worry that they won’t live up to their first (accidental, fluky, one-time-only, never-to-be-repeated) success.

But putting out a ‘zine—really a glorified letter to a few friends—is doing something for me that I didn’t expect. We’re all taught that writing is torture: 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. Traditionally, you force yourself to get up and go to your desk at some ungodly hour before the children (or cats) wake up, every day writing those morning pages whether you want to or not. Writing is usually presented as an onerous chore, and the writing that results is usually onerous, too. I’ve become more interested in finding my natural way and my natural voice—no more tortured attempts at literary descriptions of the landscape or the weather, no sad fictions about a lonely young girl in northern Michigan. Writing is fun when you surrender to who you really are—not the next Dostoyevsky, not the next Anne Lamott, but whoever you are, which you discover through the doing of it. You painters will know what I’m talking about.

I’ve also discovered that I don’t have to follow the other standard writerly advice, which is to write full out without editing, without stopping the “flow.” Since my greatest joy by far is in the editing, I’ve always hated that advice. For me, spewing a lot of unconsidered words on the page just means that I come back to a mess later and have to start over. Archaeologists don’t use a bulldozer to dig up big plots of land and then claw through the dirt looking for artifacts. They sift carefully, brushing the earth away from small chips, keeping a running account of what they’re finding and how it all fits together. Maybe those are the two extremes. The point is that we all have our own way to dig for our treasures. I was gratified to hear Fran Lebowitz say in an interview, “Writing is editing.” But she also thinks writing isn’t fun, so I’m trying to take her philosophy without the tortured spirit. Writing is editing is fun.

Let me also say for the record that I hate the ubiquitous writing exercises. “Write for 5 minutes about your grandmother’s shoulders.” I don’t even remember my grandmother, let alone her shoulders. I know these exercises are supposed to loosen you up, but I can’t bring myself to write pointlessly on random topics. And you can’t make me.

So for the past month I’ve been having a great time, writing over morning coffee or in the evenings after my paid work is done. (If you’re just joining us, I’m a self-employed scientific editor.) Some of the stories I’ve started to write are very personal—about my mother, my childhood traumas, my total isolation as a teenager. But I’m grappling with how to approach these stories, how to make them less ponderous than they felt when they were happening—how to inform the past with my present perspective.

My therapist, J, says I need to establish a relationship with my audience first. I already have a relationship with most of you, but you may still not be ready to hear about my mother finding my “sex” diary, or my phobia about throwing up in junior high, or about the alcoholism, illness, and death that dominated my early years. (I can hear you clamoring now: “Oh please, please, tell us about the alcoholism, illness, and death that dominated your early years!”) Anyway, I’m sorting these questions out and pondering such things as how to maintain the privacy of people I want to write about who aren’t dead yet.

A case in point—the above-mentioned J. She’s very supportive of this ‘zine but is afraid I’m going to write about her. At least that’s how I interpreted her saying, “I’ll have to be careful of what I say from now on.” I had referred to one of my stories as “the story about my mother,” and she said, “All your stories are about your mother,” and we both cracked up, it was so true. So I threatened to quote her in the masthead or something. Anyway, I assured her that I’m not going to write about her. (This doesn’t count, does it?) But I think there’s an old saying, “All’s fair in writing and war.” So check out mary’zine #3 for a story that encompasses J, my mother, a sweet tooth or two, and an essay contest in search of a queen.

animal lover

I’m not a vegetarian, far from it; I’m one of those classic meat-eaters who don’t want to think about where their food is really coming from. A few years ago, one of my work projects was editing a training manual for the care and use (as they put it) of laboratory animals. The first picture I saw of a rabbit being restrained, I thought I was going to throw up. And that was just a drawing! I told myself (Official Justification) I may be helping animals by making sure that scientists who work with them follow correct procedures and know how to keep them from experiencing too much pain. Still, the argument felt a little hollow even to me.

So I’m working on the manual one day, and at the same time I’m thinking about my poor cat Tweeter, whose malignant tumor has come back after being cut out a year ago, and I’m planning my dinner, Uncle Hugo’s Garlic Chicken, and I’m wondering, what is our “right relationship” to animals anyway? Who are we to each other? And especially, what is our responsibility to them? “I love cats” and “I love chicken” aren’t equivalent statements. As I’m sitting there, I notice that there’s something crawling around inside my desk lamp, which is made out of a large wine bottle I acquired back in the ‘70s. It has a lamp fixture stuck in the top with a cork, and I haven’t taken it off in 20 years, and there’s no way for a spider to have gotten in there, but there it is, crawling up to the cork and then back down, over and over again.

I don’t know if it’s the convergence of all those animal thoughts, or the idea that this is something I can do something about, but now, all I can think of is rescuing that spider. So I take the lamp thing off the bottle and take the bottle out on the patio, but some big parts of the cork have fallen down inside the bottle, so I can’t shake the spider out because it will get creamed by a flying piece of cork, and besides, there’s a hollow section of cork still in the bottleneck that the spider refuses to climb over. So I’ve got the bottle at an angle, trying to encourage it to leave, but strangely, it will only crawl toward the opening when I hold the bottle straight up. So I’m talking to it, urging it on, trying to trick it by holding the bottle up and then quickly putting the opening down by the ground so it will get a whiff of nature or something, but no. So I go back in the house and cut the cork out of the bottleneck, bring the bottle back outside, prop it on a rock so the opening is pointing downward, and then finally, finally, the spider manages to crawl through all the cork rubble and out the top, and I make sure it lands on the soil not the concrete, and I go back in the house and go back to reading about animals in cages, and feel sad for my poor cat, and think about how good my chicken dinner is going to taste.

THE POOKIE CHRONICLES

the great Pookie

judgment day

I live in my own little world, as most of you will not be surprised to hear. It’s a small kingdom—queendom—with only one subject, Pookie, a cat the shape and color of a 14-pound meatloaf. I took Pookie in sight unseen more than 12 years ago. I was supposedly rescuing him from a friend’s abusive neighbor—or at least that’s what the friend who wanted to get rid of him when she moved told me.

It’s good that the population of this sovereign domain is small, because the queen and her subject are both getting larger by the year, and the castle is condo-sized.

I used to have a little gray striped cat, Tweeter, who was the joy of my life until she died tragically young of a tumor. Tweeter was cheerfully oblivious of just about everything, including me—unless I was lying in bed, and then she would curl up in my arms, round and round, like a clock winding itself. I’m not sure she ever figured out that this nice, manageable-sized lying-down person was the same as that hulking monster who loomed over her the rest of the time.

Pookie is never oblivious, and he’s not your stereotypical cat who wants a human around only when he’s hungry or needs a warm place to curl up in. He has many doglike qualities, though thankfully he doesn’t bark or drool. When he’s feeling emotionally needy, he flings himself on his back in front of me as I’m trying to walk across the living room floor. I used to stop, squat down, and pet him every time, but that got old real quick. So sometimes I’ll just walk by, pretending not to notice—like I’m on my way to something really important in the kitchen—and when I come back through the room 10 minutes later, he’s still on his back with his paws curled in front of him, looking expectantly in my direction. When he’s feeling really needy, he’ll sit by my desk and stare up at me, his big green eyes beaming love rays. When I make eye contact, his head dips a little in acknowledgment and gratitude, but he never takes his eyes off me. That’s when I feel most queenly, like I should be touching his head with a sword or something.

(Am I the only one who finds it necessary to pretend to an animal?)

But at other times, Pookie seems to be reconsidering the wonder that is Mary. His looks are often thoughtful, speculative, as if he’s thinking about all the times I didn’t stop to pet him, the times I yelled at him for sprawling in the middle of the dining room table or tiptoeing across the kitchen counter. Now and then it’s as if a tiny light bulb goes on over his head, his eyes narrow, and the dim, distant thought begins to form that I may not be the perfect royal mistress after all. Like Columbo in his rumpled old raincoat, he seems to be biding his time, collecting evidence without giving anything away. I’m waiting for him to pause at the door and turn back and say, “Oh, one more thing….”

When his loving looks turn to darker glances, I’m afraid he’s seeing directly into the dark regions of my heart. It’s as if he’s my animal soulmate who sees all and knows all. His looks are most disconcerting when he sits a couple of steps down on the staircase and watches me in the upstairs bathroom. I’ll be sitting innocently on the toilet, minding my own business, and I’ll happen to look over, and there he is. All I can see are his ears and frowning eyes peeking over the top step, the rest of his large porky body hidden from view—as if he’s pondering his prey before making the final assault.

Let’s face it, I have not loved Pookie unconditionally, as I loved Tweeter, and I’m sure he knows this. True, my complaints are petty. He’s kind of a pest with all that flopping on his back, he leaves little bits of litter all over the house, he eats whole clumps of his own hair and then has to throw them up, he stands in the litter box with his ass hanging over the side so that the only real point of the litter is to give him something soft to stand in. He’s also very jealous. He used to jump out from behind doors and attack Tweeter, just jump on her back and sink his teeth into her neck. (He had at least 10 pounds on her.) I was constantly rescuing Tweeter and yelling at Pookie. He would turn, his eyes glittering with unspoken thoughts, and skulk away. Tweeter, happily lacking any short-term memory whatsoever, would sidle up to him five minutes later and expect to be licked about the head and shoulders. Pookie would accommodate her until he thought I wasn’t looking, and then CHOMP—Tweeter’s high-pitched cry would ring out, and I’d have to rescue her again.

As you can see, life was much more complicated when I had two subjects, so there won’t be any more little kitties coming to live with the queen until the aging Pookster finally goes to meet his Maker. [Ah, famous last words.]

Speaking of meeting one’s Maker, sometimes I get the feeling that Pookie was sent to me as a spiritual test—a test of my capacity to love an imperfect creature. (Come to think of it, I’ve been tested on this fairly often.) If so, I’m failing badly. My uncanny feeling that he can see directly into my soul makes me wonder what awaits me on Judgment Day. For one thing, what if Pookie is on the panel of judges?

Here’s how I see it going down. I’ll show up for my day in court. I don’t know if Jesus has anything to do with Judgment Day—maybe he’s the public defender. I hope so. Because on Judgment Day, I’ll stand in the dock, look up at the figures on the bench, and this is what I’ll see.

  • all the telemarketers I’ve ever hung up on;
  • almost every dog I’ve ever encountered;
  • most of my ex-girlfriends;
  • several men from my lesbian separatist period;
  • and Pookie… with a gleam in his eye that says, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you now.”

And on this day of days, I won’t be the queen of the realm anymore. I’ll be stripped of my powers, reduced to my true essence as one who failed to love God’s more annoying creatures. And all the judges will be staring down at me, balefully, the way Pookie does now—just the tops of their heads and frowning eyes sticking up over the edge of the bench. Ready to pass judgment on me for all my earthly sins. Ready to let me have it.

Take me as I am without one plea, Pookie,

I throw myself on the mercy of the court.

pet ER

Whenever I sit down at the dining room table to eat, Pookie never fails to rise from whatever heap he’s been dozing in and plod by me on his way to the litter box in the next room. “Ah, mealtime—time to take a dump!” As I watch his tail disappear around the corner, I’ve been known to mutter, “You little prick.”

I was muttering out of the other side of my mouth one day when his frequent trips to the box revealed that something wasn’t right. Unfortunately, I misdiagnosed his problem, just as I had misdiagnosed my appendicitis a couple of years before. I thought he was just constipated, so I plied him with Laxatone and tried to ignore his pathetic appearance as he hunkered oddly around the house and sought out increasingly more obscure hiding places. I checked on him regularly, but sometimes it would take me 10 minutes to find him, and it’s not that big of a place.

Naturally, I didn’t realize how bad the situation was until 11:00 that night, when I was about to go to bed. With the clarity that nighttime brings to any medical emergency, I suddenly knew it couldn’t wait until morning. So I stuffed him into his carrier and took off for the pet emergency hospital a few blocks away. (There are advantages to living in a semi-industrial area. If I want a tire, a windshield, or a piece of lumber, I have but to walk out my door. Apparently, pet hospitals aren’t wanted in the nicer neighborhoods, either.)

I naively expected to be the only one there, but the place was busy—there would be a 2-hour wait! It’s the only pet ER in Marin—or so the girl behind the counter told me when I started to huff myself back out the door with my heavy cargo—so I sat down in the plastic-chaired waiting area begrudgingly—oh so begrudgingly. I was starting to get that buzzy feeling from being up past my bedtime, and I was now convinced that Pookie was at death’s door because of my negligence. Worst of all, I hadn’t brought a book. I kicked myself for stashing a spare read in the duffel bag at home but not in the earthquake kit in the car—proving my point that emergency supplies are never in the right place when you need them. I could have lived in the waiting room for 3 days on the rations I had in the car—but there wasn’t a damn thing to read out there, unless you counted the instructions for purifying water. The only reading matter in the waiting room was Martha Stewart Living, but I wasn’t that desperate.

The other women who were waiting had thought to bring books but were mostly ignoring them in favor of chatting back and forth, encouraging one another about their respective pet emergencies. I was grumpy and didn’t feel like obeying the waiting room rules—at least the rules for women—smiling, being nice, showing an interest. I envy men the social permission they have to sit there like a bump on a log, taking up space, not putting out an iota of “please like me.” Some would say I don’t do much in the please-like-me-iota department myself, but they would be wrong.

As I sat there, trapped, feeling like I had already been tagged a troublemaker when I tried to leave for pet ERs unknown, I wondered if I was on the cusp of that charming time of life when a woman decides that it no longer matters what strangers think of her. Forget all that “When I grow old, I shall wear purple” crap; when I grow old, I shall be a royal pain in the ass to all the young women who still believe that being nice is the first commandment.

After a few minutes, I muster up a smile at the woman closest to the door and tell her I have to leave for 10 minutes. As I run to the car, I wonder if she thinks I’m abandoning my poor cat. I drive home and retrieve my book—fortunately a brilliant one about a young woman who spent a horrible summer with Lillian Hellman—ah, an old woman who had totally lost her desire to be nice! It’s a theme! When I get back with my book safely in hand, I’m able to wait out the rest of the time with equanimity and even summon a smile or two at the new incoming women who have delayed all day taking their cats to the vet.

Eventually, Pookie is diagnosed with a urinary track blockage. The situation is serious, because his kidneys could fail. I get home about 1 a.m., and in the few short remaining hours of the night, I dream that he dies and the vet bill is $30,000.

But when I go back to pick him up at 7 a.m., he’s still alive and the bill is “only” $500—at least for the ER part of the journey. Next stop, the regular vet.

It’s not looking good—both the ER doc and the regular vet say they’re “concerned”—and I’m told it will take 24 hours to get Pookie stabilized. So I try to get some work done in my sleep-deprived state, feeling guilty about all the times I called him a little prick (Pookie, not the vet), and when I come downstairs for dinner there’s a message on my answering machine from the vet saying to call him back before 6:00. It’s 6:15, and I figure it has to be bad news. I curse him (the vet, not Pookie) for not at least giving me an idea of why he was calling. I figure he wouldn’t want to leave the message, “Sorry, your cat is dead,” but I would rather hear that than “Call immediately.”

So I spend the evening worrying, trying to imagine the outcome, trying to prepare myself for the worst. I’m reminded of “Schrödinger’s Cat,” which, if you remember your quantum physics, was a thought experiment about a hypothetical cat in a box and the observer who doesn’t know if the cat is alive or dead until he opens the box. I think Schrödinger proved that the cat is both alive and dead, and so is the observer. I don’t know how that explains life in general or Pookie’s situation in particular, but the puzzle keeps my mind occupied. I can almost see that Pookie’s fate is truly undetermined until I know what it is—and I wonder if it’s true that our existence is entirely dependent on being observed. It’s like the old conundrum about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a noise when there’s no one there to hear. [News flash: the answer is no! A hearing apparatus is needed to receive the sound waves.] But before an event has revealed itself, is it possible that all contingencies are equally present? Note to self: Brush up on your quantum physics.

So in the morning I call the vet at the earliest possible time, and voila! Pookie lives! But the bad news is that he needs surgery to, as the vet delicately puts it, “turn him into a girl.” I want to say, thanks, Dr. Bill, for pointing out that girls are just boys with gashes where our thingies should be. $1,000 later, the surgery is a great success, but it has not been reported whether Pookie has started meowing in a high voice. Wait, he already did that.

So Pookie is now stranded on the planet Venus, having left Mars and certain anatomical parts (the little prick, in fact) far behind. He isn’t out of the woods yet (speaking of trees falling unheard), but I have high hopes, high apple pie in the sky hopes. Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant—

Epilog. What I’ve realized while writing this story is that my attitude toward old Pookie—fortunately, the name is androgynous—has changed. In some ways he’s more of a pain than ever. He’s now prone to urinary tract infections, which require applying ointment at one end and dropperfuls of pink viscous liquid at the other. But there was something about seeing him knock knock knocking on heaven’s door and then getting him back again (do you suppose he got to the light at the end of the tunnel and relatives told him to go back, it wasn’t his time yet?). Anyway, my heart has softened toward the big lug, and now he’s the one who gets treated like royalty.

Maybe Judgment Day won’t be so bad after all.

[Mary McKenney]

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mary’zine random redux: #4 May 2000

March 14, 2009

I was telling J (my therapist) the other day, “I’d rather have 100,000 readers than a million dollars any day.” J asked what that would do for me, and I was amazed to hear myself say, “It would make me feel like I was part of humanity.” I’ve never really felt like I belonged here, on this planet. So knowing that other people are actually moved to laughter or tears by what I write is a revelation to me. Maybe I’m not so strange and alone. Maybe I belong. And it occurred to me that a lot of people must feel this way, all of us bumbling along, feeling different, feeling wrong, feeling separate—unheard, unseen—and that is why we are always looking for ways to connect.

***
I had this whole issue ready to go—ruminations on everything from caffeine addiction, to my time as a morally bankrupt librarian, to death, dreams, and metaphysics—but events overtook me, and I decided to write about my laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder surgery) instead. Lucky you!

déjà vu all over again

As I troll the aisles of United Market in search of rations for the days following my upcoming gallbladder surgery, I don’t know if the strong sense of déjà vu is from my December 1999 controlled buying panic preparatory to the nonevent of two centuries passing in the night, or if I’m harking back to Pookie’s ER experience. After all, he had stones, I have stones. He had an inessential body part removed, I’m about to have an inessential body part removed—my fourth, in fact, after tonsils, uterus, and appendix. I feel as if God is taking me Home piece by piece.

But there was no time to shop before Pookie’s turn under the knife, so this heady feeling of “Anything goes—and I’d better be ready for it” has to be related to my late-millennial buying spree—if “spree” is the right word when you’re pushing your cart slowly, contemplatively, down the aisles of forbidden treats, rationalizing your future need to be rewarded for having survived a natural disaster. Ordinarily, I would resolutely avert my cart from the tempting display of Pepperidge Farm soft-baked chocolate chocolate chocolate (how many chocolates? I can’t think straight after the first two) chunk cookies, but it seems I have entered a Twilight Zone of extreme calm and purposefulness in which anything in the store is mine if I but pass mine eyes over it. The mission that is driving me today is—I will be stuck in the house, alone, for days after the surgery, so I am allowed to imagine the medical and/or psychological postsurgical therapeutic benefits of any substance within reach. “Get it while the gettin’s good” is another way to look at it.

So I linger in front of the rows of soft, cuddly bags of soft, cuddly cookies, and my eyes are caught by those magical words: “REDUCED FAT.” If I remove my glasses and zoom in closer to the bag, I can read the rest—“25% less fat than our regular soft baked cookie.” Of course, this statistic is meaningless, because if a regular bag is 100% no good for you, then going for the 75% version is hardly a calorie-cutting measure. By law, the fine people who make these cookies down on old Pepperidge’s farm should not be allowed to use the word “reduced” or refer to the ephemeral 25% at all. For the sake of truth in advertising, the bag should read:

INCREASED FAT—75% MORE THAN IF YOU WALK AWAY RIGHT NOW.

But 25% in the hand is worth 75% on the shelf (who says I’m no good at math?) so—plop, there they go, landing softly in my cart. Hope I can keep my mitts off them until I get home from the hospital. For good measure, I throw in a “mango tango” shake, a vanilla Frappucino, a quart of orange juice, fresh raspberries, half a cooked ham, and a whole roast chicken. I feel like I’m preparing for a picnic instead of surgery. As a concession to health, I toss in some frozen veggie burgers. I predict that hell will freeze over before those things ever get thawed.

(As I reread this, the day before surgery, the Frappucino and raspberries are long gone, but the cookies and, God knows, the veggie burgers are still waiting for my triumphant return.)

It’s amazing, the preparations I have to make for being away from home for a day and a half. The cleaning, the packing. The calling the East Coast publisher to arrange to get the last figure captions for Recombinant DNA and Biotechnology—looks like I’ll be editing on my recovery bed—no sick leave, no vacation pay, or personal days for the self-employed—or is that “no rest for the wicked”?—the instructions on what to take and what not to, the meal planning before and after, the setting the VCR so I’ll have “The Practice” to come home to, the grocery buying, the phone numbers, the prescriptions, the errands, the cat food, the mental preparation for death, the hormone replacement patch—stick it far from the gallbladder—the preregistration, the forms to fill out, the blood test, the urine test, remember to tell them about the problems I had after the colonoscopy, was it the Versed? To complicate matters, my carport is going to be repaved the day I return, so I have to arrange for P and C to take their truck home (it gives me a feeling of security to have a pickup parked out back; I’m tempted to install a gun rack), and I have to move my own car out to the street before I leave. In this neighborhood, it feels like leaving my only child out in the yard for 2 days. I’ll remove my valuables—sleeping bag and survival kit, car phone—but still. In case my carport is covered in bubbling tar when I get home and I can’t get to the back door, I have to round up the missing key to my front door, which I never use. Can’t find it, so what am I supposed to do, leave the door unlocked? Then I have to buy bigger food and water dishes for Pookie, plus a second, huge litter box, so he’s completely self-sufficient for the duration. He’s going to feel like Pookie in Wonderland, everything suddenly getting bigger on him. Of utmost importance is what book to take. I decide on Cryptonomicon, a huge, elaborate novel about cryptography, computers, and World War II—probably too much for my postsurgical pain-addled mind, but I don’t want to get stuck with Family Circle as my only option.

No wonder I don’t travel.

Last but definitely not least, I have to arrange for a ride to the hospital and back. I have to arrive at 7:00 a.m. Monday and leave around midday on Tuesday. This is a dilemma of enormous proportions, because I find it really hard to ask for help. I hated having to accept charity as a child (we needed a lot of it) and I somehow got it in my head that it’s shameful to need anything. J has to talk me down from my panic, as if I were a kitten stuck in a tree. I ask her, half-jokingly, half-defiantly, if she’ll come and take me to the hospital, and she says she can’t “rescue” me from this challenge—but if I ask three people and can’t find anyone to drive me, then yes, she will drive over from Berkeley in the morning and pick me up. I am deeply touched by her offer. I know there’s no way I’m going to let her do that, but talking it out with her helps me see that the problem is all in my head, so I get on the phone and call a few friends, who are, of course, happy to help.

And by the way, I feel like writing an “Ode to J” for this woman who perfectly inhabits the role of my therapist, with a rare (in my experience) combination of looking out for my best interests and keeping boundaries intact, yet showing me very clearly how much she cares for me. Her integrity is unwavering. She has never let me down or tried to take advantage of me. The fact that this amazes me tells you something. I have been ill-used by certain female authority figures in the past, and J has done a lot to repair the damage. I am grateful for her presence in my life.

I have started writing this story before the actual surgery, counting on something of interest happening that will make all this introductory material worthwhile. I would hate for it all to be much ado about nothing, as so many of my preparations for disaster turn out to be. And I don’t want to have to resort to fiction, not my strong suit. (“Dear reader, it was terrible—the doctor took out my liver instead!”) Never fear, I have a backup tale to lay on you if the gallbladder story turns out to be benign.

***
Well here I am, back home… pain and Vicodin battling for dominance… and I shudder to think of some of the “special” moments I endured in the hospital. There was pain, there was nausea, there was a cloyingly rich yellow mystery soup I dubbed “cream of butter.” I think what I suffered from the most, though, was e-x-p-e-c-t-a-t-i-o-n-s. Because of the brief time I’d be there, I naively thought that it would be a piece o’ cake. Apparently, it was a piece o’ cake for some people. When the surgeon came in to discharge me, he bragged about the procedure, “What could be easier?”—but of course he hadn’t been with me during the long night of bloodletting (I learned that I have thin veins that disappear at the poke of a needle), the projectile vomiting, the excruciating catheterization.

But the expectation that failed me the most was the idea, the hope, that I would have a transcendent experience like the one I had after my appendix ruptured 3 years ago. Come to think of it, the first day or so of that hospitalization was no picnic either, but what happened toward the end of it wiped the bad parts from my memory chalkboard. With apologies to those who’ve already read the story, here it is. (I return to gallbladderlessland a few pages on.)

the parsley epiphany

We are not human beings with occasional spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings with occasional human experiences—Deepak Chopra

Two weeks before my appendix burst, I had this dream:

I’m driving a small truck, like a camper, and I park at the edge of a cliff. I have to get out on the cliff side, and as I look out the door, I’m so close to the edge that I can’t even see the ground the truck is standing on. I’m going to have to go down the little steps and turn and step onto a rope ladder attached to the truck and sort of climb sideways to get to the back of the truck to the ground. I spend what seems like an eternity looking down into nothingness and wondering if my weight hanging off the side of the truck will cause it to topple over the cliff. But it seems steady enough… so I finally do it, I go down the steps, turn, put my feet in the rope ladder, which swings out away from the truck a little, and I am acutely aware of that vast abyss below me….

I woke up at that point, but not in a panic: I knew I had made it—I didn’t have to play out the rest of the drama and actually reach solid ground. It was all about being willing to hang there, suspended. I can still feel that vivid sensation in the pit of my stomach—how it felt as I swung out from the truck, absolutely nothing below me.

Trust is hard for me. I have a lifelong tendency to feel that disaster is always about to happen. If it doesn’t happen, I make it up. I constantly find myself in the middle of a mental drama in which, to take the most common theme (especially at night), a man is breaking into my house. This fear is somewhat understandable because I’m a woman living alone and it’s been known to happen, but I am also capable of worrying that an airplane is going to crash into my roof. It doesn’t really matter what the imagery is, there’s just a sense of always expecting to hear the bad news on the phone, the sound of breaking glass, it’s a feeling of what next? I hear a strange noise and my adrenaline starts pumping. I’m sure there are psychological reasons for this tendency, but that’s not the point. I’m now over 50 and wondering if it’s possible to have a sense of ease in my life. Trust the universe? Easier said than done.

And then, one day my appendix burst. I didn’t know that was what was happening, it didn’t feel like a burst, it was more like a slow turning of screws in my midsection over the course of about 30 hours. It is, of course, ironic that I assumed the pain to be benign—for once, I didn’t immediately leap to a disaster scenario—and I assured myself that it was just some gastrointestinal bug from the leftover Chinese take-out I’d had for lunch. As time went on and the pain got worse, I was thrown into that excruciating inner debate: Should I take the big step of calling the doctor? (I never think they’ll know any more than I do.) What if I ask my friend Jean to come all the way from Fairfax to take me to the ER and it turns out to be nothing?

As it happened, I called her just in time, I got to the hospital just in time, they operated just in time, and my life was saved just in time. Which tells me that, yes, of course, I can trust. Trust myself, trust my intuition, trust that I’ll know when the crisis is real and not manufactured by fear. Trust the universe to be “endlessly correlated” (Deepak again) whether it looks like it or  not. I’m not just saying this because my life was spared. People die all the time. The issue is not—Trust, and only good things will come to you, nothing bad will happen to you, no bad man will break in, no airplane will crash, no illness will come. There may be a local rupture—of a doorway, a roof, an internal organ—but there is no rupture in the fabric of being.

Upon arrival in the ER, as I was lying in pain, freezing cold, while an angel of mercy tried unsuccessfully to insert a catheter to take a urine sample—HURT much?—I felt safer than I’ve felt in a long time. Part of it was knowing that I had navigated the rocky road from “I don’t want to bother anyone, it’s probably just gas” to actually getting my body where it needed to be. But on a much deeper level, I felt that I was safe in the universe. I’m not that thrilled with the word “universe,” but I don’t know what else to call it. I’m not trying to aggrandize my little self, we’re all hooked up to the “universe” through the catheter of our individual lives—now there’s an image—but what I mean is the deepest, truest pulse, the heartbeat that runs through everything.

And so, as I was rushed up to surgery—ah, the thrill of being the center of all that attention, my reward for the preceding hours of solitary torment—I felt that it truly didn’t matter if this was my time to die, it didn’t matter if this drama, the drama of little Mary, one of countless millions of dramas, was about to end. I knew I was held in much bigger hands than the hands of the surgeon. As I had that thought, I flashed on the hands of the blue Being in one of my recent paintings. You could as easily say that I was held in those hands. Whose hands they are doesn’t matter. Hands are there.

After a few days of, let’s face it, pain and misery, when I was unhooked from the I.V. antibiotics and was able to eat soft food, I sat in my hospital bed, looking out on Mt. Tamalpais, and the sun was pouring in, and all I could see out my window was green, except for the birds who would come up to the wire netting and look in and chirp and fly off again. As I contemplated the food on my dinner tray—the usual hospital fare, not the carrot cake and chili dogs I had been dreaming of (literally)—I saw that the same “cottage cheese and soft fruit salad” I had had for lunch had been dressed up for dinner with a sprig of parsley on the cottage cheese. This simple, even lowly, probably mechanical gesture (I don’t think someone in the kitchen was sending me waves of love by tenderly placing the parsley just so) pierced my heart. It touched something in me about the care that had sustained me through the difficult days, the focused attention to keep me safe, the confluence of events and help from friends, and even a compassionate surgeon (!!!). I felt so blessed, and the blessing came by way of a sprig of parsley and a ray of sunlight, it was such a simple thing.

But the real surprise was when I examined my good fortune, and I knew that the gratitude was not for anything. It wasn’t for the nurses, the doctor, the sun, the view; it wasn’t for another friend named Jean, an out-of-towner, who drove to Marin without a map and found the hospital by sheer luck and intuition because “calling didn’t seem good enough”; it wasn’t for my medical insurance, my restored health, my repaired bowel; it wasn’t even for my life. I was not grateful for my life. The gratitude just kept tunneling down, and it wasn’t dependent, I was grateful for no-thing. Each good thing that had happened could have been taken away—including my life—and the gratitude wouldn’t have been touched in the slightest. I found this most curious.

And so I ate the cottage cheese and the tasteless, touch chicken tarragon with canned mushrooms, not being grateful for any-thing, and tears fell on my hospital gown and I thanked God, and I felt so incredibly held in grace. And it was not Mary that was being held, Mary was just as meaningful and meaningless as the sprig of parsley—a manifestation of God’s love and completely expendable at the same time. What an incredible precipice to teeter on, but it didn’t feel like teetering, because the precipice and the abyss were one, there was nowhere to fall, there was no one to fall, no truck, no rope ladder, no ground, no dream separate from reality, no rupture of any kind.

It’s not that I have attained enlightenment and will never have paranoid fantasies again. In fact, the day I came home from the hospital, I found myself in another fantasy loop of “what if something awful happened, what if my guts fell out of my stitches and I had to call 9-1-1 and the medics had to break down my door and the neighbors looted all my belongings….” Then it hit me what I was doing, and I thought, oh my God. It already happened. One of my worst-case scenarios already happened. Something burst in my belly,  a true life crisis burst upon me, and what did I do? I handled it. Or it was handled. The friend was called. The doctor was summoned. Life took its course.

It was a wonderful insight to see that the ravings of the mind are completely unconnected to reality. And a deep experience (a spiritual experience, for lack of a better term) may not even affect the mental level, because the mental level is what it is. It made me realize that I don’t have to set a new standard for myself now that I’ve “seen the light.” Maybe I’ll jerk to attention when I hear a noise outside, maybe I’ll stave off the bad man in my imagination, maybe I’ll fear the worst over and over again. The mind is not capable of deep change. I can probably hope to catch it sooner, and I expect I will. And then I will go on with my life. I will not look for change on that level, because it’s not relevant.

I have been given the gift of the piercing moment of truth, the fleeting awareness that the things of my life are not the Real, whether they are sweet and precious or difficult and painful. The truth is: Appendixes can rupture. Being cannot. On some very deep level, it doesn’t matter what happens to you.

Do I need to keep this gift on display, keep asking to see it again, as if it will disappear? Where could a gift like this go? Sure, it would be nice to live in a state of higher consciousness, but it doesn’t ultimately matter. What’s true is still true, whether I believe it every minute or not. This releases me from a potential burden, the burden of trying to live up to something that’s beyond my mind’s comprehension. I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to attain anything or “be a better person.” The truth doesn’t have to set me free. How liberating is that?

Epilog: A few weeks later, I received a questionnaire from the hospital about my stay there. One of the questions was: “Were your spiritual needs adequately met?” I had to laugh. Oh, yes.

***
Back to the present

And now do you see why I had such high expectations about going back to the same hospital, the same surgeon, as if I had attained a level of blissful transcendence that would keep me safely above it all? And just in time for the ‘zine—how appropriate my two stories would be, cheek by jowl, as if I were singularly blessed to be able to perceive the usually fearful experience of surgery from some higher plane. Yes, that earlier surgery and its aftermath were a gift, but so was my safe transport through this less-threatening experience, just as every day is a gift—but how tempting it is to single out certain moments, to want only the heady insight, the glorious relief, the ice cream that sweetens and numbs the pain, the bliss of oblivion named Vicodin when the throbbing gets too bad, the luck of the draw that brings the sweetest nurse on earth to your side when you need her the most.

I think my lesson here is that holding out for epiphanies is a lost cause, because they’re not within my control. All I can do is take what comes. Besides—when I think of sweet Pramila, who came in to take my breakfast tray and said, with a twinkle in her eye, “Are you finished with this, or are you still enjoying your coffee?” (you would have had to taste the coffee to get the full effect of this quip)—and another twinkly-eyed chap who said he was writing on my chart, “Patient claims to have washed up and brushed her teeth already”—I know that epiphanies aren’t made up of only the amazing insights or the moments of life-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-death. Epiphany is where you seek it, I suppose.

I sit here typing this on the evening of my return home—physically drained for sure, and feeling a little let down, but still grateful for the love of the people in my life and the disinterested but caring presence of the angel-strangers at the hospital. Somehow the very ordinariness of what I went through, compared with the earlier surgery, feels appropriate. Life is not scripted, much as I would like to cut and paste only the happy endings. Maybe that would be the beauty of being a fiction writer, epiphanies a dime a dozen as long as you can fit them into the plot.

But even having to stick to “facts,” it seems that things tend to connect up, that even dashed expectations and failed attempts at transcendence play their part in life. I got up after typing the above paragraph—suddenly I felt the need to wash down my evening Vicodin with two chocolate chunk cookies—didn’t want to risk taking the drug on an empty stomach, you know—and I accidentally stepped hard on Pookie’s tail. He retreated to his little bed under the stairs, turning his head away and refusing to purr as I petted him and apologized profusely, asking his feline forgiveness. I knew it would come—his brain isn’t big enough to hold a grudge—but I wished I could erase what I had done.

And then I thought of poor Nurse S., whose catheterization technique was pure torture—something about my vagina being “too high”—I worry about my body like everyone else, but it never occurred to me to worry about that—anyway, she came to me when her shift was over, took my hand, and said how sorry she was to have caused me pain. Even though I murmured, “It’s all right,” it didn’t feel all right in my heart. I judged her harshly and held on to the resentment, banking it as if it would pay interest some day. But now I see the true epiphany of this story. Transcendence is not just about the moments of grace or pleasure or love; there is salvation in the difficult moments, too. I see that sometimes it’s my turn to be the one who forgives and not just the one who gratefully receives.

[Mary McKenney]

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#1 in a series… the best of the mary’zine that never made it to print…

March 9, 2009

Scorpio [horoscope for Sunday, February 8, 2004]:
Listen a minute, Scorp. Your appliances, your furniture, the walls of your home are crying out. “Fix me! Fix me!” It’s pathetic! How much longer can you ignore their cry? The message is loud and clear: It isn’t enough to just capture the castle. You have to maintain it.

Anyone who has entered my home knows that my credo is: “I believe that housekeeping is an art.” To that end, I have constructed a Housekeeping as Art Installation Project in my condo that I call “I Was Just About To….” This installation was originally meant to be fluid and ever-changing—responsive to the vicissitudes of life—but it tends to stay pretty much the same, gathering dust (literally and figuratively), which I believe only adds to the authenticity of my artistic vision. In the sense that housekeeping can be seen as “keeping the house pretty much as it is,” I offer the following Installation Art ideas as the perfect hom[e]age to the house and to me, its estranged -wife.

Visitors, art patrons, and utility men (your PG&E, your SBC, your Comcast), should they be allowed to pass through the portal into my home-slash-gallery, are greeted by the sight of a modern-day vacuum cleaner, with all of its accoutrements, in the dead center of the living room. This is a bold statement that references the sheer futility of modern civilization’s obsession with cleanliness and the elimination of pathogens. “I Was Just About To Vacuum” is at once a comment on the good intentions of the Artist and the never-ending work of “keeping house” (as if it’s going to get up and leave if you don’t watch it every minute), especially since one of the Artist’s companions is a big old hairy cat. As part of the “Vacuum” project, tufts of Pookie’s hair are artfully placed (by him) in widespread patterns covering large portions of the once-tasteful, once-light-gray carpet, like a Buddhist monk’s mandala painstakingly created in colored sand—with the difference being that the cat-mandala is not destroyed immediately after completion. Supplementing the cat-hair arrangements are individual Kleenexes covering stains also produced by Pookie’s inner (and I do mean inner) process, some wrapped tightly in hair, others the raw materials of creativity, intestinal division.

Off to the side of “I Was Just About To Vacuum the Floor” [alternatively titled, “I Was Just About to Shave the Cat”] is an auxiliary installation called “I Was Just About To Do the Laundry.” It will come as no surprise that this project consists of two or more piles of dirty clothes, artfully divided into light and dark (symbolizing, of course, the duality of the material world), with a squirt bottle of “Shout!” standing at the ready. “Shout!,” of course, provides a fascinating subtext that can be analyzed on many different levels. This is an interactive exhibit, and the visitor, or patron, if she or he chooses, may apply “Shout!” to the many paint stains that are randomly distributed on the clothing worn to a recent—OK, not so recent—painting intensive.

Until the visitor, or patron, ascends to the second floor of this three-dimensional art installation, she or he does not realize that an ironic echo of the “I Was Just About To Do the Laundry” exhibit takes up a small corner of the Artist’s bedroom with “I Was Just About To Put Away Last Week’s Clean Laundry.” This of course illustrates the Cycle of Life, and any puns on “wash cycle” are heartily encouraged.

But before we go there, need I mention that the kitchen environment is rife with witty exhibits? “I Was Just About To Do the Dishes”? “I Was Just About To Empty the Dishwasher”? What’s slightly different about this display space is that it has the most “behind closed doors” exhibits, meant to be ferreted out and discovered anew by each visitor, or patron: Surely you can recite along with me: “I Was Just About To Clean the Refrigerator,” “…Take Out the Garbage,” “…Replace the Broken Light Bulb Over the Stove,” and so on and so forth.

There is a surprise in the small downstairs bathroom, where the visitor, or patron, is greeted by the striking juxtaposition of two rubber gloves with their “hands” in the sink, one of them gripping a heavy-duty sponge. An ambiguous shrine to indoor plumbing, it was the Artist’s intention that it subtly conjure the Ghost of Housekeeping Future. “I Was Just About To Clean the Bathroom” is as straightforward as it is witty. Again, interactive play in the form of putting on the gloves and scrubbing a bit of bathroom sink is highly encouraged.

I hesitate to catalog the contents of the downstairs “junk” room, because I haven’t got all day, but here’s a start: bags upon bags of cardboard for recycling [toilet rolls, Kleenex boxes], whole cardboard packing boxes [“I Was Just About To Cut Up the Boxes into Neat Flat Pieces”], bottles and cans, brown paper bags, junk white paper (“white trash”), shredded bills, newspapers, and the multi-sensory (sight, smell, crunch [litter bits popping under one’s feet]) installation of “I Was Just About To Clean the Cat Box.” In the corner, amid the bottles of Earthquake Disaster Water and Extra Rolls of Toilet Paper and Duct Tape is a small, poignant display, almost an afterthought, of an old red-handled hand saw (contributed by P. DuPont a là Her Ancestors on Her Mother’s Side) with two tattered gardening gloves gripping its rusty teeth in a silent indictment of my neglect of Patio Nature entitled “I Was Just About To Prune the Oleander.”

I forgot to mention that in the midst of the major installation currently being promoted are layers of previous installations, which are equally dusty though slightly less transparent in meaning: the life-size plastic skeleton wearing a University of Michigan baseball cap, seated behind a semicircular desk adorned with books, metal sculptures, D. Hullet original creations (a cloth beaded and milagro-festooned snake, a glittery star), and front display shelves with… geez, I’m getting tired of this inventory, let’s just call it: “I Was Just About To Tell You Everything I Have in the Skeleton Behind the Desk Installation and the Walls and the Bookcases and the Antique Chest and the Dining Room Table….” Let me just say that Ms. U.M. Skeleton is holding a large teddy bear with “Holiday Greetings” and “From Michigan” spelled out in glittery letters on the bottom of its feet. Can you top that, dear reader? I thought not.

The final installation, “I Was Just About To Take You on a Tour of the Upstairs But I Am Daunted by the Art-as-Function and Vice-Versa Layers of Work and Music and Play and Gifts and Criss-Crossing Strings of Paper-Lanterned Christmas Lights (a là K. Luna) and Bracelets Hanging from S Hooks (a là Ms. Luna and Sister B),” ends here, I’m afraid, where I sit amidst the rollicking decorative chaos that is my office, with the computer keyboard on my lap, ignoring Pookie’s attempts to get my attention from the shelf under my desk by sticking his head out and making his eyes big as saucers, and contemplating my next project, “I Was Just About To Get Back to Work.”

Prices are highly negotiable.

[Mary McKenney]

128820576785196204

No, this isn’t Pookie… or is it??


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