Snippet About P. #1

(First of ten snippets about my longtime friend P., who in the past few years lost his health, his home, his lover, his cat and portions of his mind. I was spending a lot of time with him in the first half of 2005, but now I’m not. These snippets are all from the past; where it says "yesterday," it doesn't mean yesterday.)

I called P. yesterday to see if he wants to see the new movie Robots. We saw the preview together, and I was enchanted by the animation. Since I see P. every Monday night for an AA meeting and all day Sunday for McDonald’s and a movie, lately I’ve been not calling him mid-week.

Last week, I didn’t call him Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and by Thursday I got a phone message, where I could hear P. saying, "What do I do?" and one of the women who works at his care facility saying, "She’s not there. Leave message. Leave message!" Then I got a second message, Siring or Gloria saying, "Please call back to P."

But I did call him this week, to talk about the movie. I’ve found it’s difficult to get him to answer a direct question one way or the other, and the first time I asked him about Robots, he didn’t say anything.

The second time, he gently said he didn’t want to see it, which I assured him was fine. He said, "I love you as much as I always do, but I don’t want to see that movie." I told him I didn’t have a problem with that, that I had asked in order to discover his preference so we could end up seeing something we both might enjoy.

His conversation can also seemingly be disjointed, though I suspect that there’s a perfect logic there for him internally, because he is consistent in his disjointedness.

In the cab last week, the day he said he didn’t after all want to see the movie he’d said he wanted to see (which also happened to be one I particularly wanted to see: Gunner Palace), I asked him, "What kinds of things could we do together if we didn’t see movies?" He paused, and then said with some degree of exasperation, "Life isn’t perfect!", which caused our driver to snicker.

It sounded like he wasn’t answering my question, or perhaps that he was covering up for the fact that he couldn’t think of anything we might do, but I think that, by his own reasoning, that was simply the correct answer.

Snippet About P. #2

Conversation itself is a new thing for P. and me, as our friendship for so long consisted of P.’s monologues on the phone. His outgoing answering machine messages used to be like sermons: "Miracles do happen. The point of power is in the present moment. God is in you, through you, around you." Sometimes they went on for quite a while, and then ended with, "P. and R., in recovery. Leave a message." I taped a message he left on my answering machine in 1999. Here it is:

"Linda, this is P.! You know, that old-fashioned turkey who lives downtown. Linda, I still live downtown with R., and, I don’t know how it is that we’re still together. We’ve been together for ten years, and, and I genuinely love you, too. I’m petrified still, for all my years of recovery, I’m still petrified of intimacy. I have to admit I haven’t worked it all through. But I do know the most powerful way out of anything is to remember your last one—your last romance, your last financial debacle, your last love affair, and that will activate on a cell level a way out of the current dilemma. And I know you’re a very gifted person, but you have some mighty challenges in this current edition called human life.

“Please forgive me for being such a pompous old windbag. I’m halfway to sixty. I’m fifty-five. And I got feet of clay, Linda. But I do show up. I show up and I show up and I still go to those awful meetings, and I just heal and forgive a lot. Because, you know, it’s about really healing my own life. Linda, if I go on at all, I’ll sound like I’m just full of hot air, but I really know the way out of anything you’re going through in this life, whether it’s childhood stuff, current stuff, grant stuff, employment stuff—whatever it is, the point of power is in the present.

“If you would forgive me for saying this, a book that has helped me incredibly much over the years is a man by the name of Emmett Fox. Even though I’m a fruit, most of my favorite writers are women—I am a feminist—Emmett Fox is one of my favorite writers and he’s perhaps even more powerful than Mrs. Eddy in a certain way, I mean in his way to cut through stuff. And his book, Power Through Constructive Thinking, by Emmett Fox, I think he’s one of the greatest metaphysical thinkers that ever lived—it’s just an opinion—and that particular book you might try to get ahold of sometime and I think that, and program stuff, will help you get through any situation that comes up, on the better side of it all.

“Okay, Linda, if you ever want me to shut up and listen, just tell me, ‘P., shut up, I wanna talk.’ And I understand because I’m old enough, I don’t really get offended by that stuff. I’m not that thin-skinned. The only issue that I really have to work is this intimacy stuff. I’m really still working on that, with friendships or my significant friend. Linda, I do love you and the very best to you today and I’m going to say goodbye now. Forgive me for running at the mouth so much."

When we actually talked on the phone, he would give a long speech about Christian Science or Mary Baker Eddy or Nikola Tesla or opera—Maria Callas or a current favorite tenor. In another mood, he might talk about fame, money and people’s looks.

He talked a tremendous amount about spirituality, and he talked about sex and gender a lot, saying, "I know we’ve all been men, women, everything. We’ve all been each other’s mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. I may be here in a man’s body this time; maybe you were, last time. Oh, I know men do a lot of terrible things. A lot of men are bastards. All I can say is I am not a rapist. Thoughts are different from actions. I have tried to do my best. I ask people, ‘Do you want a hug?’ I don’t just grab." Then he would say, "Linda, if you want to talk, just tell me to shut up. Say, ‘P., shut up, you old fart. I want to talk.’"

Snippet About P. #3

A couple of years or so ago, I made my regular birthday call to P. and a woman answered the phone and said he’d had a heart attack and stroke and was in the hospital. When he returned home, he was so anxious that his lover broke up with him and moved out, and then he was there alone, recovering from a heart attack and struggling with a partial plate which made it hard to eat, and worrying himself sick over having lost half the vision in his right eye, worrying about whether he’d lose the rest of his vision, worrying about whether the various medications he was taking had actually caused the vision loss.

I asked what his doctor had to say, but he said he never saw the same doctor twice. P. worried that the medication might be causing side effects—he read the labels carefully, with their alarming details—and fretted that taking them at all was contrary to Christian Science, but he also didn’t dare to stop taking them altogether, or perhaps he experimented with not taking them, to ill effect. Perhaps he was not taking his psychiatric meds as prescribed, thus causing his terrible anxiety.

He was also caught in a bind between Christian Science and AA. AA says, "You’re as sick as your secrets," implying that you should tell everyone everything, or at least tell everything to someone or other.

I gathered from what P. said that Christian Science says that to give voice to something is to make it solid and more intractably present, so he didn’t know whether to say he’d lost part of his vision or not say it, and whatever he did, he felt he’d done the wrong thing and his anxiety increased. He spoke of suicide often in the middle months of 2004.

Yesterday P. called me twice while I was at work. Sometimes he says in his message, "I need to get your number," or "I can’t figure out your number," even though he has just called me at my number.

I called him back and found him watching TV at a paint-peeling volume. He asked, "How are you?" I said, "Good, but you’re making me deaf." As far as I know, he doesn’t have problems with his hearing, so I don’t know why he turns the TV up so high. Later in the conversation, there was a lot of racket outside, and P. said, "God! Every fucking car is going on!"

When I got home, there was yet another message from him, telling me that there had been a lot of excitement since I’d spoken to him a couple of hours before, that the union stewards had been there. But when I called him back and asked him about the union stewards, it didn’t seem to ring a bell.

I could hear the screaming lady in the background. P. said, not without a certain admiration, "She can do that twenty-four hours a day." I said, "I’m surprised she doesn’t lose her voice. It must be very annoying sometimes." P. said, "She deserves that because of all the times women were abused."

Snippet About P. #4

Soon P. and I were in a cab and rolling over to the Richmond. I rolled my window down and the wind roared in and I said, "This is the life: riding in a cab with a handsome gentleman on a sunny Sunday." P. liked that. He smiled and agreed, "This is the life: riding in a cab with a handsome woman."

We went over to the Balboa Theater, on Clement out near the beach. P. developed a desire for See’s candy and asked a couple of people where he might find some. There wasn’t a See’s near there, but a woman directed us to a candy shop just a couple of doors up the street where they had bins full of garish novelties drenched in food coloring. They also had ice cream and P. got a chocolate cone. He asked the two women in the store if we could sit outside, and dragged a chair out to the sidewalk, where he and the sidewalk became thoroughly covered with chocolate ice cream.

Then we went to the theater and saw Bad Education, which I liked a lot. Beforehand, P. asked if I’d help him take off his jacket. When I didn’t spring into action instantly, P. said, "I can find someone else to help me take off my jacket," and then he grinned at me, which I knew meant, "I’m guilt-tripping you right this minute and we both know it because we’re both alcoholics and we know all about guilt-tripping."

When we came out of the theater after the movie, P. accosted three Asian fellows leaving a restaurant and said, "If you wanted to go out to eat and you didn’t want Asian food, you wanted a burger, where would you go?" One of the men suggested Bill’s Place, at 25^th and Clement.

P. had been there many times in the past and was inspired by that idea, so we set off there. After he realized I meant to make him walk the entire way, he insisted on walking on the shady side of the street, though he almost always wants to be in the sun. He proposed taking the bus and actually flagged one down, which stopped and then went on when we didn’t walk over to it.

"Why can’t I take the bus?" asked P., sinking onto a seat in a bus shelter, and looking like he might cry. I passed the buck to his sister and said she had decreed that there would be no bus travel, but said that I agreed, and that it was because we love him and are afraid he’ll fall and crack his head open.

He said, "Okay, now I understand. I don’t know why you didn’t just say so in the first place. So I can’t ride in a bus, but can I ride in a cab?" "Yes, you can ride in a cab all you want."

On we went to Bill’s Place, with P. asking constantly, "How far are we from there?" and asking every second passerby, almost all of them Asian, "Sir, do you know where Bill’s Place is? You can’t always eat Asian food."

Finally I said, "We know where Bill’s place is: It’s at 25^th and Clement." He said, "Just because you know where it is doesn’t mean I know where it is."

I told him that he was my good friend and that I loved him but that the questions were becoming irritating and that I hoped he wasn’t going to say, "You can’t always eat Asian food" to every single Asian person in the Richmond.

He was silent and I added, "Why don’t we save up the questions for those times we really don’t know the answer?" But of course he does not know the answer. For one thing, he likely already forgot the answer he heard half a block ago, and I guess he’s right that my knowing something isn’t the same thing as him knowing it, though it does also slightly offend my ego to have him place more trust in some random stranger than in me.

However, he probably has been asking questions of random strangers for decades and it’s probably not exactly something I should take personally. I resolved once again to just let him ask whatever of whomever.

Snippet About P. #5

The next day, we went to the AA meeting, as always. Or it seems like always, though it was only our ninth week at the meeting. Many of P.’s pants no longer zip over his belly. The ones he was wearing that night weren’t zipped at all and you could see his hairy belly, perilously close to his pubic hair. But no one at AA cares about anything like that, which is a nice thing about AA.

I told P. that if we got over there a bit early, we might get to sit on the couch instead of on the hard bench. "Girlfriend," he said, "Can we talk?" This meant he wanted to sit on the couch, so we went over there and sat on the couch, and I brought him a cup of coffee not all the way full, and someone at the meeting marked a list to show P. the other meetings in the neighborhood.

P. wanted to go to the store after the meeting, but I really needed to get home and go to sleep, and it was after nine by the time we left the church, anyway. He had a moment of altruism and said he should just head home so I could also go home, but added that he didn’t know how he was going to get inside his house, as if he thought I was going to leave him in the middle of the street and walk off. When we got to his side of the street, he whispered that there were bad things happening in his house, but refused to say more.

Snippet About P. #6

Ugh, terrible day today. It started out OK, which is to say it started with three phone calls from P. before the alarm went off. I got up and called him back, and then a few hours later, just as I should have been going out the door to go to his house, he called again. "How are you?" I asked.

"Surprised."

"About what?"

"I don’t need a reason," he said primly.

We discussed the time of my arrival: "What time are you coming over? Twelve-thirty? You’re coming over at twelve-thirty? That’s today? Is today Monday? Is it Sunday? Say it again. What time will it be?”

Then he expressed his gratitude: "Thanks, Dad." Half the time, Dad is a big bastard who is apparently in the penitentiary for unspecified crimes, but sometimes I get to be a more benevolent Dad.

I replied, "You’re welcome, little girl."

"I try to be the best little girl I can."

"You’re my pride and joy."

At his house, I called a cab, Gloria and I assured him that it wasn’t going to rain and so he didn’t need to bring the plastic bag he uses as rain gear, and we set off for McDonald’s.

I’m not sure at what point I slipped into an irritable mood. The movie we were going to see was right across the street from McDonald’s, at Opera Plaza, and I was slightly irked when he suggested we walk up the street to see what was playing at the other theater.

He had a big piece of red crud in one ear today, which was grossing me out a bit. I didn’t know if it was a scab or a piece of fermented earwax or what. I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him to go look at it in a mirror.

P. got a cookie at the concession stand, but decided it was too hard and traded it in for something else. He told the attendant and me, "It’s too hard," and pinched it to prove his point. "Stop pinching that, P. Someone else is going to be eating it." The attendant, who looked a bit like a gentle Vincent Gallo, was quite gracious.

We saw our movie and I felt vaguely guilty when it proved to be more violent than I’d expected. P. smelled strongly of urine today, which has not been the case for several weeks.

After the movie, I went to the bathroom and then found P. interrogating the concession guy about another movie, which was playing at that same theater in forty-five minutes. When we walked outside we saw that it was, of course, raining. We sat down and P. tried to talk me into going to see the other movie. I really didn’t want to, because I thought it was going to make me late getting to sleep.

P. said he needed something uplifting for the coming week. I said he could be uplifted by the fact that next week we’d be coming back to see the movie. In the end, not least because it was raining and we didn’t have our raincoats, I called the house and told them that P. and I would be back later than usual.

Then I announced that he would need to come with me while I had dinner, and I marched toward a sushi place. P. said, "I can’t afford that."

I said brusquely, as if now that I had given him what he wanted, I had a right to be rude, "You won’t be eating. You had a filet o’ fish. I’m going to eat." In the restaurant, he unwrapped his chopsticks and scratched the back of his head with them, which was more or less tolerable, but then he stuck one in his ear and started to dig around. I said, "Stop that. That’s gross. I’m thinking of the person who has to pick those up later who won’t know there’s earwax on them."

He said, "There isn’t any earwax," and tried to demonstrate. It was gross, but it wasn’t really right for me to think I could speak to him in a way I would never dream of speaking to most other people. For instance, I wouldn’t say to my father, "That’s gross." (Of course, my father rarely puts anyone in the position of having to decide whether or not to say, "That’s gross.")

Snippet About P. #7

While I was out last night, P. left a message saying he would like to talk to me, but by the time I got home, it was 10:30, so I didn’t call him back. This morning at 8:15 he called me again.

The other day, when my bicycle seat was stolen, P. said, "Repeat after me: I am grateful for the abundance in my life that means I could have bought another entire bicycle if I had to—and paid cash."

I didn’t feel he was minimizing my loss, which was indeed minimal to begin with, and I appreciated his reminding me of something that is true and that is a cause for gratitude: Losing the entire bike would be upsetting, but not a crisis, and losing just the seat was really nothing.

But it turned out he was worried about possibly having given offense, by telling me what to do. I reassured him as best I could and we got off the phone. Before we hung up, he thanked me for not turning my back on him, which was heartrending. I reassured him.

In the afternoon, I was doing my weekly cooking chores when P.’s sister called to tell me that his newest doctor has insisted on changing his medication, and that now P. is beset with anxiety, apologizing to her for things that don’t warrant an apology, and that maybe we should stay at P.’s house tomorrow instead of attempting a movie, though she said it was up to me. That explained P.’s intense concern about offering the little gratitude reflection.

Soon thereafter, P. called me and announced that he felt very anxious and fearful. He was unusually full of questions: What had I cooked? Was I a full vegetarian or did I sometimes eat meat? Is it true that I never watch TV? How long have I worked where I work? Do I have a 401(k) from work and a Roth IRA? Do I also have some cash? Does he look like he’s 70?

He had another question: Had I heard from my ex-lover today? I said that Tom and I had actually had a fight last night, and therefore we had not spoken to each other today. P. asked, "Will you punish each other for a long time?" I realized he was worried that I’d get mad at him and punish him for a long time, maybe stop being his friend, and so I said, "No, no. We won’t do that at all. We’re still friends. It wasn’t a bad fight."

Then P. said, "I shouldn’t have asked that. Now you’re going to be angry." I said, "It was just a little fight. I wasn’t angry for very long, and I’m not angry now. It’s not making me angry to talk about it. It’s fine that you asked that."

On the contrary, discussing it was making me see how stupid it was to think Tom and I would stop being friends over one snappish exchange. I told P. that Tom and I would talk to each other very soon, and then I made it true by calling Tom right after P. and I hung up, and leaving a message that said, "We’re still friends even though you were mean to me last night."

Tom called back very soon and said, "We’re still friends? Too bad, because I had almost gotten us on Jerry Springer."

Snippet About P. #8

At P.’s house, there is a woman who is very tiny, with delicate features and downcast eyes, who creeps about the hallways, holding the railings. I greeted her the first couple of times I saw her, but she didn’t so much ignore me as seem to be unaware of my presence, so after that, I left her alone.

P. told me that, of all the people in the house, this woman, whose name is Renee, is the particular butt of the screaming lady’s malice. How dreadful that must be, to be physically small and infirm and have to live where someone tortures you emotionally.

I started to get feeling that maybe Renee was becoming used to me, so today I greeted her again, and she gave me a fleeting smile, though she didn’t look directly at me. After P. and I returned from our outing, we were sitting in his room when Renee came to the door and said, in a tiny voice, that she didn’t want to interrupt us, but she needed something from P.

She walked in and right up to him, and he said, "I can’t play house right now." After he repeated that, she turned to me and I saw that her robe was hanging open, and so I tied the pink strings for her and I gently held her outstretched hand, and she beamed at me, looking right at me for the first time, and told me I was a good person and that if there was any money left over, I should get it; that I’ve worked for it. I realized she was alluding to P.’s will.

She wished us a good night and a happy new year, and crept off. After she left, P. grumbled that this woman is always touching him, and he doesn’t like it. Very soon she was back, with her robe undone again and a diaper in plain view. I tied her robe closed again.

Then P.’s other sister called, and I went into the living room to give him some privacy, and talked to Kay. Renee came in, with her robe open again, and Kay said meanly to her, "Ain’t ya even ladylike?" I was appalled. I wanted to say, "Oh, well, she’s among friends," but I guess she isn’t.

P. said later that Renee’s neediness irritates the other women, and that they hate her because she’s very old, yet gets around without a walker.

I was glad P.’s sister had warned me about the ill effects of his medication change. His eyes also looked rather odd. She had thought we might be better off not attempting to go out, but P. said he was up to it, and there was only one untoward event, in a coffee shop in the Ferry Building.

P. ordered a plain cup of coffee, but ended up with a foaming coffee drink of some sort. After a bit, the employees realized what had happened, and told him he had someone else’s drink. He got agitated right away and said, "But this is what you handed me!"

He had already poured some of it out to make room for milk and sugar, so they took it back and poured it out, which further upset P. He opened his mouth to say something else, and I said, "Just calm down. Don’t say anything else to them. Just leave them alone and let them get your coffee. Everything is OK."

Then one of the counter people said to P., "These two women are getting their drinks. Let’s just leave them alone and then we’ll get your coffee." I would have thought that was slightly rude, except that I had just said almost exactly the same thing. I still don’t think the counter person should have said that, but in fact, a quick study, he had learned it from me.

And I had said it because I got tense about a possible fight, or about P. becoming very upset, and so I wanted to quell whatever there was to quell instantly. I guess I should have just focused on calming him down and not told him what to do or not do, since it wasn’t strictly necessary.

Snippet About P. #9

P.’s Best Remarks Ever

I got two calls from P. He very much wanted me to take him to an AA meeting that evening, and he said these things:

"It's not very nice, you know. I'm your old grandmother. Your old grandmother likes to get her orgasm occasionally, too."

"It's much harder to be a man because we have PMS nine times a week."

"I'm a man. I'm not the most stunning man, but you're just letting me sit here like a slab of meat."

"You threw out all that candy and didn't even let me have any, due to some stupid thing like additives."

"I don't even look like I'm 62. I'm look like I'm a very beat-up 39."

"Here you have this beautiful older man with liver spots on his hands, and you won't even do anything nice for him."

"You won't even give me any halvah. You gave it to your coworkers. Here's a poor old woman [him] in a nursing home ... "

"If you were a good girl, you'd take me to the meeting. You're very mean. You think I'm a hooker, don't you?"

Snippet About P. #10

P. seems to be a bit jealous of Tom lately. He asked why Tom’s girlfriend doesn’t mind us going to the movies, which we are going to do tomorrow night. Then he said, "You’re going to the movies tomorrow night with Tom, right? How big is he?" I said, "He’s six foot two, about 200 pounds. Do you think you can take him?" P. said he absolutely could.

Yesterday he called and said, "This is Tom." Then he asked, "When are you and Tom going to the movies? When are you and Tom coming home from the movies?"

He asked what I was doing, and I said I was cooking. He asked, "For you and Tom?"

He had to go eat, so I asked him to call me back afterwards so we could decide what time to go out today, and this he dutifully did, though he couldn’t remember why he was calling.

This morning I got a call from P. at 7:55. He asked, "Are you in the sack with Tom?"

"No!"

"Why not?"

"We broke up years ago. Are you in the sack with Tom?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I was never involved with him."

The next call from P. was at 10, now impersonating Tom’s python.

He also said, "I don’t know what to do with myself besides sleep. If I were on a cruise, I could go for a swim in the heated pool. No heated pool, no cruise."

He asked what I was doing. I said I was eating breakfast and he asked, "With Tom?"

Recently, P. mentioned that his sister said if he can find someone to live with, she will pay his half of the rent. Someone "like you or Paul Trupin."

"Paul Trupin is dead," I said.

"Where is he?"

"Dead."

And not long ago, P. said, "I’m an old idea about to become a new idea." He lamented that he had not been present at the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: "I wish I could have been there. I could have had long dresses."