Sorting Through The Remnants

The first year is for grieving, and the second seems to be settling in as a time of contemplation, of remembering and sorting. In the time since Kristina’s death I’ve read as much as I could handle about the type of personality changes that occurred when her tumor spread to her brain. Much of what happened to her mentally followed the set pattern for prefrontal tumors, but some of it was rare and uniquely her, as she was, as her life was.

We met when we were both fourteen years old, behind a wall of headdresses worn by showgirls in Vegas shows. Her mother was what they then called the wardrobe mistress. She kept all the little pieces of sparkly material and shiny things whole. I remember how her fingers sometimes bled from hours of stitching beads onto tiny pieces of fabric. I also remember her kindness, her love for her daughter, and her acceptance of me, a strange little white girl from a family who mostly spoke something other than English.

I remember that night so clearly. The dancers entered the stage in a mist that cast a muted light on their nearly naked bodies. It allowed every toned muscle, every shadow, every curve to stand out. They wore tiny pieces of flesh covered gauze on their mandatory covered parts, and a powdery glitter on their bodies that danced with them as they moved. It was magical and both Kristina and I watched enchanted as they danced to the haunting notes of a single flute.

This is how our friendship of fifty-six years began. Over the years we became the vaults of each other’s darkest nightmares. I listened to her fears that one day her father would kill her mother. She saw my bruises, the welts, the broken fingers I showed no on else. We became good at hiding each other, of waiting in the shadows until it was safe to come out.

We were with each other during our first high school crushes, and then through all those that came after. I was with her the night her father killed her mother. She was with me the night my father cracked two of my ribs when he kicked me in a blind rage because I wouldn’t give him money.

We learned love broke our hearts over and over again, but we still continued to believe in it. We fell in love with each other, with others, with those who loved us back and with those who didn’t love us back. We both got married in college to men who were not like other men, men we knew would never hit us, abuse us, or abandon us. We were determined to break the pattern, to fight back, to say no, to not live our mother’s lives.

When it came time for graduate school, we ended up on opposite coasts, but not a month went by without a letter, a card, a phone call, and in later years, emails, texts, messages, long full pages of thoughts we worked out on each other. We used our ability to shape thoughts into words for a business that was uniquely suited to who we were as ourselves and to each other. We worked as freelance artists in both print and digital. And we wrote 500 word essays for blogs, news sites, individual writers. The buyer would fill them in with their own words, their own expanded ideas.

We worked hard for little money. It was mostly boring. One of us would start the essay, the other would add to it. We emailed each other the pages back and forth until they were done, ready to sell, boringly complete and precise. Vanilla writing for vanilla people. Even now it is impossible to tell who wrote what sentence. We both did is the only correct answer. It was how our minds worked with each other.

As we got older birthdays became milestones instead of celebrations, and the one that stood out for both of us was the 70th. We called it the year of no fucks left to give, the year we would finally experience complete and total freedom from the expectations of anyone and anything. We plotted and planned, thought of contacting our old peace rat collective from high school, and all the artists from then whose friendships kept us alive during those awkward years. But shortly after her 68th birthday, Kristina was diagnosed with breast cancer.

She dealt with it the way she did everything. She researched it. She studied it. She interviewed those who had it. She visited the dying when she learned it was terminal. But she thought she had time. We both thought she had time. We continued to plan. We continued to hope. And then it spread to her brain and everything turned upside down, inside out, and changed everything forever.

Her memory seemed burned away, forgotten, and replaced with nothing but confusion. Except for one small piece, a period of time when we first met, our high school and undergraduate years. Those years were clear as the present, as real to her as me and Stefano and everyone else in our lives. Except for the holes in her memory of specific times and places, she seemed the same Kristina, as long as we lived with her during that period of time.

But she wasn’t the same Kristina. She didn’t just remember those years. She moved into them. They became her present, her current life, her only memories. In retrospect I can understand how it was more than the tumor. It was also something else that happened as we aged. We remembered the past again. Things that were forgotten are suddenly remembered.

For me it was difficult beyond words. It was a painful time of my life, one I’ve done my best to bury. But because the woman who carried my life inside her, the best friend who knew everything about me went to live there, I had no choice but to follow her.

But I was a bystander and she was a participant. She imagined events were happening that long ago passed into faded memories. She tried to set me up with my high school crush, like she once did all those years ago, only he was long gone. But her brain couldn’t grasp that. She simply did not understand me when I tried to explain. The extent of it didn’t become clear until Stefano and I went through her laptop.

She used voice to text software to contact our past, to give it shape in a world that no longer existed. She wrote to people who didn’t exist, and she wrote to those who did, but not as she remembered them existing. She professed love to those who damaged her ability to love, and she apologized to those who hurt her. Her world was upside down and I was merely a member of the cast, a silent one too numb to do much but shut down everything I felt so it wouldn’t hurt so much when I lost her. But it still hurt. And it still does.

And now it has been over for a while and I understand much more than I did. I know why she chose that period of time. It was where all the unresolved issues lived, because as we aged we developed the skills to at least smooth the edges of those issues that came after. But then we were clueless and so they festered inside us, interfered in everything from choice of lovers to career paths. Our pasts didn’t go anywhere. They just lay in wait.

So besides her loss, besides cleaning up a very large mess she left behind with her strange and bizarre letters to people in our pasts, besides learning to say to myself what I once said to her, I’ve been cleaning up my past. I’ve been confronting the worst of it.

I’ve been painting some it with the help of an art therapist. But most important of all, I’ve been healing from it. I can’t change the damage that was done to me physically, spiritually, psychologically, but I can find the point where I can live with it. In a strange sort of Kristina way, that was the best parting gift she could leave me and I thank her for it. I thank her for living. For loving. For helping me get to this point of delicious freedom where I have no fucks left to give, and all the best memories live in my heart.

Kate Taylor’s Art

Growing Up In Vegas

I am constantly surprised by how many acquaintances, and even some friends, don’t know I grew up in Las Vegas. I spent twenty years of my life there, a very significant number of years during one of the formative periods of my life. I arrived there when I was eight and left when I was twenty-eight. And yet, I’ve been gone for so many years, it’s understandable many don’t know that part of my past.

I learned things in Las Vegas that you can only learn by living there for an extended period of time, things that never made the tourist ads. For example, it was a very godly town. There’s several religions that exerted their influence on local school boards, political decisions, and inflicted their version of morality on everyone else. I doubt that’s changed. Extremism doesn’t give up fucking people for money, it just finds a new bed partner.

Religion in Las Vegas taught me what hypocrisy looked and smelled like. It looked a whole lot like a preacher who bellowed from the pulpit about sin and the evils of drink, whoring, and gambling. But if you looked closely you saw the outrage ended at the church doors. Those same preachers flung open the welcome sign when there was money involved.

And there was no difference in Las Vegas between preachers and politicians, because it wasn’t the unsavory sinners who funded them or the casinos. It was those fine upstanding moral citizens and their banks who invested in the debauchery because it honored the only god they truly worshipped: the holy dollar.

And there was no one holier than the pulpit pounder who availed himself of an escort “service” on Saturday night and then stood in line to be forgiven on Sunday morning. And chances were excellent at least a couple of those escort earnings graced the collection plate when it was passed around.

The other thing I learned growing up in Vegas is that sex was a commodity like anything else. It’s a state of legal brothels. Like many who live or have lived there, I grew up with women who were sex workers. It was not a glamorous job. But neither was working at Wally’s world for shit wages and exploitative conditions. Or in any of the casinos if you served drinks, danced, entertained or anything that required you to wear skimpy pieces of fabric in your “job.” It was shitty work like any other shitty work. Just because it was sex didn’t make it better or worse than gutting chickens or shoving packages along an assembly line. It was a job. No more no less. And the moralists were usually the ones profiting from it. You can bet on it.

The other lesson I learned growing up in Las Vegas was personal. Gambling is a serious addiction. My father gambled. He sucked at it. That guaranteed we were often evicted, lived in cheap motels, in the car, or on our way somewhere the debt collectors wouldn’t find us.

We were often without enough to eat, or on the rare occasions we had a roof over our heads, we would come home from school to find everything gone, down to the pots and pans because they were sold to get gambling money. I learned the lessons of non-attachment early in life.

But the benefit to growing up in Las Vegas was there were then and probably still are a lot of under the table jobs, non-union, no taxes paid or declared, no age requirement. During the worst of my father’s gambling sprees, I was always able to find some kind of job in some crappy way off the strip restaurant by lying about my age. Tips brought immediate food. I was 14 when I went to work at the first one. The first lesson I learned was to unbutton the top buttons on my uniform so I’d get better tips. I didn’t care. The money went to that week’s crappy motel.

But the best thing about growing up in Las Vegas were the entertainers. There were lots of professional dancers, musicians, writers, and all kinds of artists. Like anywhere else, the bigotry and intolerance was nearly non-existent in such communities, and I got an early idea of what the world could be.

And while there will always be racist assholes in the woodwork, there was more diversity per block in Las Vegas than in most places. People came from all over to visit, to work, to perform, to teach. No matter where you worked, you worked with a diversity of people from other cultures.

It was just part of Vegas. I grew to expect it and that was the hardest part of not living there anymore. Everywhere I went seemed so bland and overly white. I was and I still am homesick for that diversity all these years later. It brought a life to the place that I miss. I don’t miss anything else about it. Like most of my friends then, we realized we belonged elsewhere and we went there.

The thing I missed least of all about Vegas was the religion. There was only one god, one religion, and that was the worship of the almighty dollar. You grew up seeing that everything and everyone was for sale. You could buy loyalty cheaper than you could earn it. If you threw a few dollars around, everyone wanted to be your friend.

It’s one of the reasons I am the way I am. I live minimally. I don’t give a crap how much money you have or don’t have. It just doesn’t impress me or buy me or whatever works for other people. I grew up watching the game and have no interest in being part of it. I think that was a good thing I brought with me when I left.

My new novel When The Last Ocean Dies

Kate Taylor’s Books and Art Ursine Logic

it was not a good time

for a black girl

for a white girl

to walk together alone

on the street at night

men threw money at us

how much for you both

fuck you we shouted together

that’s all you get for your dirty money

fuck you and no more

and then we’d laugh

and run before

they ran down their lists

and checked off

whores, maids, the laundry ladies

are fucking each other

faded away from them

like screams of frustrated rage

ugly old boys

who shouted their lust

from their cars

we cut our fingers

mixed our blood together

we vowed to protect

each other forever

from men like them

from men like our fathers

we were the strength

our mothers lacked

we walked away together

and nothing they did

nothing they said

nothing they shouted

could change that

so they bellowed out their windows

fuck you you’re too ugly

we didn’t want you anyways

***************************

My personal website

Kate Taylor’s Books and Art

Befriending The Demons Lurking In Our Pasts

“Solitude changed us. It made us confront who we were. As dark as it was outside, inside of us it was even darker. When there’s no one to talk to except the demons, you talk to the demons and they talk back to you.”

 from WHEN THE LAST OCEAN DIES

Reconnecting with my high school friend has been far more rewarding to both of us than I imagined. I almost hesitated before I sent those emails. I didn't want to bother people. I didn't want to interrupt their lives with bad memories. High school friends who try to contact you when they're old is almost a joke, a meme, something no one wants. But I've always been different. My beliefs always fell outside the safe circles. And the memory of one friend gave me the courage I needed. I'm so glad I did and so is she.

We were friends then because we were the fringe weirdos, writers who brought books to parties so we wouldn't have to talk to anyone. We were both so shy the other kids avoided us in case it was catching. We still have a hard time talking to people we don't know well, but we've become less shy about talking to ourselves. It's good practice in case the world ever goes back to something resembling normal.

What we also share is that neither of us attended nor will ever attend a high school reunion. The thought alone is enough to freeze our spines in the permanent upright terror position. It was not a pleasant memory for either of us, but especially for her. 

She was black, and when our high school began to have daily race riots, she quit and started attending an evening high school for dropouts, the same one I attended a few weeks later after I was confronted by a teacher, a counselor, and some dour guy in a suit to give up the names of those I "worked for" in the anti-war group.

I refused and they gave me the option of dropping out or be expelled. I walked out and never went back.  I was 1/8 of a credit from graduation with nearly a 4.0 gpa. I have never regretted that decision although I did cry when my high school class graduated without me. I recovered nicely from that when B.B. King turned out to be the commencement speaker at our school for dropouts and other socially unacceptable misfits. We gave each other a virtual high five over that memory.

We were each other's first close female friend. We knew secrets about each other that no one else knew. We kept them in our pockets, away from other people.  Even now, as we write back and forth about those times, the pain of the abuse we suffered still clings to a lot of the words. We play the remember game with each other. 

Remember when we wore long sleeve shirts in the summer to hide the bruises?Remember the police telling us to stop making our fathers angry and the abuse would stop? Remember how long it took for us to learn it was never our fault? Remember them spitting on me and calling you names when we tried to sit together in the movie theatre? Remember how we did it anyway? 

We didn't have boyfriends then. The only men we knew were brutal, violent, and terrifying. We had friends who were boys and in looking back they shared one thing in common, they were gentle spirits, and shy like us. They were as my friend said "good people." We ended up marrying that kind of man. 

We were friends for three years, working together in the same sleazy off the strip coffee shops enough days to collect tips and an under the table paycheck half what they paid servers and kitchen help of legal age. But it allowed us to rent a safe escape room in the part of town my father would never think to look for me, and her good church going mother wouldn't dare be seen in alone. We were 16 and kept it until we graduated. It was a secret we kept from everyone we knew. I think it was a test to make sure we were okay to trust, and we passed. During those years, we became each other's model of true friendship, a model that hasn't changed. It's our standard and it was hard earned so neither of us ever settled for less. 

In our last few letters we tried to figure out whose idea it was to get involved with the anti-war group that consumed two years of our lives and grew into a lifetime commitment to peace, but true to our friendship we finally agreed it happened simultaneously. We made some good friends from that group, people who believed in the power of one person to change the world. We have always strived to be that one person.

We lost touch when she was accepted at a university on the east coast and I stayed in the west. But our lives followed remarkably similar paths. A couple of BA's, graduate school, the poverty years, the illness that almost killed us, but ended up changing us forever instead. And love, so much love. We're still a couple of weirdo loners, but we learned to trust love.

"We both have so much love in our lives, from so many. It healed us, that love," she wrote in her last email. Yes, that love did heal us. And it will continue to heal us. As one of the characters in my book is fond of saying. "Love is all that can save us now." 

My personal website:
Ursine Logic's Books and Art