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this is a "true"story.

Memories of Long Ago

(When I Was More and/
or Less Accommodating)

by j jackson


After I got out of the army, still only half-mature, I moved back home for a while and my old rivalry with my half-sister began right where it left off. One day, I met her as I was walking up the hill toward home, in front of a neighbor's house two doors away. From down below, when I first turned onto the street, I'd seen her repeatedly putting something into her mouth and spitting it out, as if she were eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the hulls. In fact, I thought that was what she was doing. But I didn't pay any attention to her at the time, only thinking this later.
As I approached her, I saw that she was hiding something behind her back, in that way that younger sisters have of making it obvious that they're up to something that you better not ask them about. I knew the game well, so I continued on, ignoring her until, as I passed her, I happened to catch site of what she held, probably because she had wanted me to. She had a large container of pills, my pills, my Valiums.
Immediately, incensed, feeling the blood pulsing up into my neck, I turned and tried to take the pills from her, but she pulled away and ran up the hill. I chased after her, but she stayed just far enough away, all the while reaching into the bottle and taking out pill after pill, popping each one into her mouth, sucking on it for a second, and then spitting it out. I was pissed that she was wasting my stash, but I didn't say a word to her, because I instinctively knew that any criticism or chastisement would only increase her spite.
She was seventeen years old at the time, but she acted less mature. Not that she didn't fit the profile of a sexually active seventeen year old girl, but that she had a rebellious streak that made her seem like a thirteen year old boy. In a way, I admired her, for eschewing the teenage female stereotype, but the admiration could never overcome the history of our psychology.
I chased her up the hill past our house, almost catching her several times, which I knew she was allowing me to do. She was young and agile, and I was older and out-of-shape, having just spent three years in the army drinking beer and eating fatty mess hall food and doing little else. She scurried across the next door neighbor's lawn, while I respectfully walked farther on and more casually hurried up their front walk. She settled on their front porch, allowing me to finally corner her. I grabbed the hand that contained the pills, but she hung onto them with her narrow bony fingers engulfed within my hand. The more I pulled at her, the harder she pulled back. When I'd stop pulling, she'd stop resisting and allow her hand to lie placidly within mine. All the while this was going on, as I pulled at her, she allowed her body to bump up against me full-force. Then, as she pulled herself away, she'd kind of twist herself against me first, so that I could feel her tiny breasts against my chest and her thin yet muscular thighs against my legs. She knew what she was doing.
Finally, I got my nails up into her palm and pried her hand from around the pills, using more force than was necessary, intending to cause her some pain, betraying the rules of the game we played, because she was the one who was playing it, they weren't my rules, I didn't want anything to do with her, at least not consciously, although, as I think back on it, I did enjoy the way she pushed herself against me.
"What'd ya do that for?" she said, pissed, the first time she had spoken to me during the entire incident.
"Fuck you," I said, more angrily than I felt, although I did feel angry and I had wanted to hurt her.
"Fuck you too," she shouted at my back as I walked away from her.
She thinks I'm mean for not letting her have the pills to continue to waste. In her mind, she criticizes me for having all of this stuff around that I hardly ever use--not only drugs, but all of my possessions. She always used to try to get into my stuff, mostly when I was around to stop her. She was punishing me, for not willingly sharing what I had with her, for not willingly sharing myself with her, and she didn't know how to get my attention except by being belligerent and mean. She knows I hoard everything I have, especially my drugs, and so she's going to waste all she can, to teach me a lesson.
I rush to my room to check my stash of grass [2 full bricks, compressed = 2 lbs., and one that has been opened, loosened and partly used], to make certain that she hasn't found where I've hidden it. I want to get it out of the house, away from any threat, before she can find it and get into it and waste it.
Later that day, in the living room, we continue the confrontation. She goes into the kitchen, to get away from me, but she returns several times to add afterthoughts to our argument. In the kitchen, I can hear her, in whispers, working on my dad. She's been doing this for days, building an alliance against me, working on his genuine love for his adopted daughter. His attitude toward me has changed since I've returned home. He used to admire me, for my intelligence and scholarship, but now he sees my presence as a burden. I attribute this to a latent jealousy that he has always been able to keep secreted away, especially from himself, but now that I have usurped the one area of life that always made him feel superior, his army experience, for which I had as a boy idolized him, he no longer feels the same about me. My maturation into adulthood is a threat to him, which my sister intuits and uses to manipulate him against me, and unless I give her what she wants (she isn't even certain what that is, but I am), she will continue her campaign to turn him against me. I can feel the pressure, the underlying censure that is very seldom stated, but which is forever building. I see it released in idle comments in regard to things like not being a sharing person or not participating in family life. I'm no different than I have ever been, but the expectations are changing, and my sister is prodding them along.
I decide, or it is suggested by implication, that I move out. I am no longer wanted. This takes my sister by surprised and she begins to mope. She didn't realize how effective she could be at influencing family dynamics. She's beginning to learn to fly, testing her wings, and she's unsure of herself. Soon, she will be unbeatable, a full-fledged woman. Then, she too will get pushed out of the nest.



A few weeks later, Mom drives me up to Eastwood to look at an apartment. I still don't have a car yet and the apartment is on the bus line, one building from the corner of the intersection. It's a single room with a very small bath the size of the large closet next to it. I like it, because it's cheap, and because it seems so self-contained. I rent it.
My first night there, I have a horrible nightmare about the place. I dream that it has a number of rooms that extend out the back of the building across the side street and down the main road. The front room of this dream apartment, a living room, is being used as a bedroom (which is actually what it is, a bedroom/living room combination.) The back rooms are all empty. Everything I own is contained in the front room, but most of the stuff is not mine. It belongs to the former residents. This, in fact, is the way the place was when I first saw it. The people who lived here had left all of their possessions. The landlady was anxious to rent the place to me and said she'd clean it out, but after she had done a hurried credit check, something came up that she had to attend to and I wanted to move in right away, and so I moved in with all of the stuff still there. And I began to dream about it, a dresser filled with clothing, sheets and blankets still on the bed, clothing strewn about, as if the former residents were not such good housekeepers.
I continue to dream, night after night, the same recurring dream, and during the day I am working long hours at my new job, going out for dinner and a few drinks every night with new friends from work, all of whom are harried and overworked, barely able to maintain the hectic schedule imposed by the domineering management in order to meet the shipping dates of an impossible and growing workload. They all hate their jobs, and I try to sympathize, but I am loving it, the overtime, and the preoccupation of it all. I will feel differently in six months, but for now, I am quite content. For the first few days in my new apartment, I come home at night only to go to bed and dream. I dream I have a car and drive through the back rooms as if I drive through the streets out behind the building. The nonexistent hallway of the apartment is the main road into the city. I take wrong turns into neighborhoods I don't know. I feel threatened and don't want to continue deeper into them, and so I turn around immediately in the middle of the roads. In my dreams, night after night, I work my way down to Blessed Sacrament school, where I went to grade school. And then the dreams end, and it is Sunday, my first day off, and I decide I'm going to have to clean the former residents' stuff out myself, because I haven't heard from the landlady since the day I moved in. I suspect that she's an alcoholic. I suspected it on the first day I saw her. I don't know why. Maybe I perceived subtle signals below the level of awareness.
The clothing left in the apartment is all female stuff. Some of it appears to be a young girl's clothing. I empty out the dresser, stacking the clothing against the outside wall beneath the window. In the bottom drawer, I find a lot of nice blouses. One, in particular, I like, a gray-blue satiny one. I begin to imagine who the woman is who left this stuff behind.
After everything is stacked neatly beneath the window and I settle down to read and decide how I will spend the rest of my day off, someone knocks on the door. I think it's the landlady, and I correct my attitude about her, in case she might perceive it. But it's not the landlady, it's a girl---a young woman.
As I peek out at her through the narrow slit in the door I barely open, in case she is someone I don't want to be bothered with, I can't help but be attracted to her. She's very thin and, except for being black, reminds me of my sister. She's a short, slight, light-skinned woman/girl. As I listen to her explain that she's the former resident, I find myself comparing her to her clothing, realizing that what I thought were kids' clothes were actually hers. She unfolds her story quickly, probably thinking I am going to slam the door on her, which I would never have done. I was having a hard time preventing myself from opening it fully. Having become destitute (she explains, in much simpler words) and unable to afford the rent, she had been kicked out. She wants her stuff, I think. But I don't feel that this is true, something about the way she acts belies this conclusion. She begins to subtly beg, I hear it in her voice, as she probably thinks I am not going to let her in, because I am stonewalling, not her, but myself, doubting my wisdom. As she exhausts her explanation and I feel she is about to turn and leave, I open the door fully to her.
"Can I come in?" she asks.
I step aside and let her pass.
As she enters the apartment, she immediately sees her clothes stacked against the far wall, and as I watch her eyes fix upon the lingerie and undergarments, I feel the blush of embarrassment she feels. She tries to regain her composure, but she cannot. Thus far, I have hardly said a word. I want her to feel at ease, but not if I have to speak any more than I know is wise, because when I do not know what to say, I tend not to say anything, which can be disconcerting to some people, which is why I do it. She starts to stammer. I can see tears beginning to well in the corners of her eyes.
In a roundabout, inconsistent, and ineffectually gram- matical way, she tells me her predicament, to which I am sympathetic, even empathetic, but to which I continue not to respond. But I guess that she feels enough of a responsive attitude in my non-responsiveness to continue on, until I begin to wonder what it is she is trying to say to me. I almost ask her several times, but I'm enjoying too much the way that she is intimidated. I don't want her babbling to end. Finally though, I can't help myself, and I ask, "What are you trying to say?"
The sudden directness startles her. She stammers. I wait.
Finally, she asks, "Can you let me stay here tonight?"
And despite my strong inclination, I hear myself telling her no, that it's out of the question. She continues to ask, increasingly pleading, until I tell her that the best thing I can do for her is to pack her things up in boxes and store them for her until she can come to pick them up. I almost say that I'll store them in the "empty rooms," catching myself at the last moment. My life has become very dream-like over the past week, and the two states of consciousness are becoming more confused as my exhaustion increases. She leaves, practically in tears, continuing to plead, hoping to change my mind, which she does not. After I close the door behind her, I wish she had. I go to bed early that night, and when I awaken in the morning to get ready to go to work, I wonder for a moment if I dreamed it all.
The next night, about midnight, I awaken to a noise. I think there are rats in the rooms, or I dreamed that there were. I lay frozen still in bed, listening, holding my head up off the pillow so that I can hear with both ears, until the muscles in my neck begin to cramp. Hearing nothing, I lay my head back down, and as soon as I do, of course, I hear the noise again. After another period of frozen thought, I turn on the light. Surprised eyes stare at me from beneath the back window. It's her. She has come in through the window, which is still slightly open. That was the noise I heard, the window sliding shut.
We each lay still, staring. Then, when she decides I am not going to kick her out, she lays her head down on her arm and closes her eyes. She looks awkward, lying on the hard floor. I toss a pillow at her, which frightens her. I knew it would. It causes her to crouch back as far as she can against the wall, which is not far, because she is already up against it. But when she understands that what was thrown at her was just a pillow, she almost smiles as she reaches out and grabs it up and pulls it in against her and settles down and closes her eyes again.
I turn out the light, and then I wish I had left it on, but I don't want to frighten her again. I lie awake until morning.



At dawn, when I can see her again, I get up, and she awakens. She looks like she resents me, for awakening her. She looks like she wants to continue sleeping. But she gets up and without saying a word, she goes into the bathroom and takes a quick shower. Meanwhile, I get dressed. She comes out of bathroom after only a few minutes with her hair dripping, a towel wrapped around her, quickly gathers up some of her clothes from the stacks under the window, and hurries back into the bathroom. A few minutes later, she emerges, fully clothed. She smiles at me apologetically as she hurries to the door and leaves.



The next night before I go to bed, I think about somehow making sure that the window can't be opened from the outside, but I don't act on my thoughts. In fact. I leave the window open about an inch. I lie awake until about midnight, but she doesn't show up. I am exhausted from lack of sleep and from overwork. I fall asleep. In the morning, she is not there.



The next night, at about eleven, as I lie in bed in the dark, I see her at the window in the light from the streetlight out back. She slides the window open and crawls in. I toss her a pillow, and she curls up around it against the wall. Again, I don't want to go to sleep, but I do. In the middle of the night, I'm awakened by a movement on the bed. She is settling in next to me, as far away on the double bed as she can get, at the bed's edge with her back to me. I can feel that she knows I am awake. I don't go back to sleep, harboring the irrational, but understandable fear that she will do me harm. I can easily guard against her if I am awake, but sleeping I am vulnerable. Towards morning, she rolls over in her sleep and settles cuddling on my shoulder. I allow her to remain there, pretending I am awakening when she awakens to find herself on me. She scurries away to the far extremity of the bed, apologizing.
Over the next few days, we become somewhat trusting of each other, although we hardly speak a word. Each night she crawls through the window and into bed, and each morning she leaves before I do. Despite her approaching attitude, she has been distrusting of me, I discover, as I begin to probe into her psychology. This is not what I wanted to happen. In fact, this is exactly what I did not want to happen. She intrigues me, and I want to befriend her, but I should know better. After a few more days of this, we begin to talk seriously, that is more seriously than our short, practical conversations had been up to this point. She says she is looking for a job, but she can't find one. I ask her what she can do, and she says nothing. I tell her that's not true. Everyone can do something. I begin to work with her without her realizing what I'm doing. I'm trying to raise her self-esteem. She offers, on several occasions, to have sex with me, to give me a blow-job, a hand-job, etc, in particular, when we are cuddling in bed, which we have taken to doing, for the mutual comfort. I tell her no, that she should not feel she has to do that. She tells me it's okay, she doesn't mind, but I tell her that she should. She expresses, in awkward and ineffective words, but I understand what she means, that since she has sunken to the state of having had to beg for a place to stay, just to survive, she might as well "sell' herself, but I convince her to see herself in a better light. I begin to buy food, mostly bread and cheese and snacks to keep in the apartment. I had been eating all my meals out. She's grateful for it.
About a week later, just after we have gone to bed, a loud knock and shouting disturbs us. She whispers that it's her old boyfriend. He shouts that he's sorry for the way he treated her and wants to come back to her. She sits up in bed. The knocking and shouting gets more insistent. I whisper questions at her, and she whispers fragments of her back story. I want to be sure that she doesn't want him back, so I prompt her to see if she'd like to go with him. She says no, that he has nowhere to go and is only here because he needs a place to stay. I think that she should be sympathetic to that situation, and so I set about to make sure that she is not going to drag me even deeper into a Good Samaritan role by indirectly inviting him to stay the night. I tell her to stay right where she is, out of sight of the door. I tell her not to let him see her, that if he does, she's going with him right now. She nods her ascent. I tell her I'm not playing any games with her. He better not see her. She pretends she doesn't know what I mean, but she does.
I go to the door, fasten the chain, and open it. As soon as he sees my face, the guy adopts a macho, arrogant stance.
"I want to see Lisa," he demands.
"There's no one here but me," I say, pretending to have been awoken.
He continues to demand to see her. I tell him I just moved in last week. The people who used to live here moved out. He doesn't believe me. I try to shut the door, but he pushes against it, preventing me from closing it. When I try to force it closed, he throws his weight against it. I throw my weight against it in response, but he rushes it and forces it open to the point where the flimsy chain snaps. Before he can adopt an offense, I throw a sharp short left directly at his face, forcing him back out of the doorway. I follow this immediately with several more sharp short lefts, backing him a few steps down the hall. I don't wait to see if the punches are effective enough to discourage him. I roundhouse kick him in the side and as he is bent and turning away I strike him across his cheekbone with an elbow, turning him the rest of the way away from me. I deliver three sharp kidney punches, then kick him hard in the middle of the back, knocking him to the floor. He sprawls across it as he slides a short distance down the hall. People are opening their doors and cautiously looking out. I say to them, "It's all over. The gentleman is leaving peacefully now." I walk up to him, grab him by his clothing, pull him to his feet, open the front door by throwing his weight against it, and toss him splayed out on the concrete walk. He stumbles to his feet, turning erratically in several circles, which reveals in the various lights the damage I have done to his face.
As I walk back down the hall toward the apartment, I see Lisa's face peering around the corner of the wall. She's still on the bed, but not hidden back where I told her to stay. As I close the door, I say to her, "I thought I told you to stay where you were." I say it too harshly, the adrenalin from the incident controlling my speech. She cowers back up the bed to where I had left her.
"I wanted to see if you were hurt," she says, timidly.
"I'm not hurt. He's hurt. And you could be too if you let him know you're here."
She says nothing. I crawl onto and up the bed to her.
"Do you believe that? Or are you going to try to play games with us?"
She turns away and reaches to the side of the bed to turn on the light. Then she turns back at me and offers her face to me, pointing to a thin scar that stretches for about an inch diagonally across her upper lip. Days earlier, I had wondered about that scar.
"He did this to me," she says.
I don't know what to say, so I say, "Good," which she isn't expecting.
She looks at me as if to say, "Good?"
"That way you know what to expect. You can't say you didn't know."
She looks at me without saying a word.
"Don't think for a minute that he's going to change."
"I don't."
"Then maybe you like it that he did that to you."
Her defensive posture immediately changes to an offense.
"No I don't like it! I hate this scar! I hate him!"
"Good! Then you don't have to have any doubts about what's just happened!"
"I don't!"
"Good!"
"Good!"
We are almost shouting at each other. We stare at each other. Then we both laugh, but awkwardly, without humor. We continue to look at each other. I reach up gently and touch her scar. "Did it hurt?"
"Of course." She looks down at the bed. I take her face in my hand and lift it back up so that she has to look at me, which she does for just a second, and then she lowers her eyes.
"I mean inside. Did it hurt inside?"
She gives me a questioning glance.
I lower my hand to her chest and lay my palm flat against her bony breastplate above her almost non-existent breasts. "I mean in here."
She drops her eyes again. "Yes," she whispers.
I lean in and raise her face with mine and kiss her.
She is mine now. I won her, fair and square, and I don't know what I'm going to do with her. Well, yeah, I do know. But I mean, in the long run.



The next morning, as I'm getting ready to drive her to a job interview, I happen to glance out the window and see the guy across the street on the diagonal corner, leaning against a building. He's all bandaged up and waiting for me, or us. Without saying a word, I lead her to the window at a position where it is not possible for him to see us, and I point her face in his direction. She gasps when she recognizes him. I turn her away from him.
"What are we gonna do?" she asks.
"Go out the back window and head straight up the street and wait around the first corner."
She gets her purse and heads straight for the window.
"Don't be looking around the corner trying to see where he is."
"I know."
She does know, I know. So if he sees her, I'll know what's going on.
I go out the front door, pretending I don't see him. He crosses the street as I'm walking to my car. He hesitates as he nears me, which is a good sign, I think. He stops about ten feet away. I can tell he doesn't know what to say. I stare at him, car door open. I'm ready to jump in, because I don't want to fight him again, now that he's prepared for me. He mumbles, only partly because of the stitches in his lip: "Do you know where she went?"
"No."
"She didn't leave a forwarding address?"
The way he said it, with his mispronunciations, sounded funny. I fought hard to keep from laughing.
"No."
"Does anyone know?"
"I doubt it. The landlady said she just took off with a bag. She threw all of her other stuff out," I lied. I didn't want him asking the landlady because she'd seen us together and would probably tell him about us, and I didn't want him asking about any stuff he might have left behind.
"I have to find her."
"Try her friends." I had to be careful. I was starting to feel sorry for him and for what I did to him. Pretty soon we'd be sleeping three in a bed.
"She didn't have any friends."
"Parents, then."
"No parents either."
"Then she could be anywhere. Give it up. It isn't worth it."
He raised his hand to his face and said "I know" as he turned away.



Lisa got a job as a waitress, and we lived together for seven months. I began making plans to go back to college, and she felt threatened. She hated that I was able to analyze her so effectively. I told her things about herself that she didn't want to hear but had to believe were true. I asked her to come with me to school. She could get a waitress job easily there. But she refused, half-heartedly trying to talk me out of going. She was going to be okay, I knew--or at least better than she was when I first met her. We made love the night before I left, but she refused to talk to me the next morning. I told her I'd call her later, but I never did.

jai jackson
6-1-1








an analysis: conflicting scripts

  • not wanting to (or more correctly, never even consciously thinking about having to) leave home v. "growing up," facing the necessity of earning your own way:
    • Lisa was the same as me, thrown out on her own and not knowing what to do, emotionally lost, looking for someone to take care of her to replace her parents/lover.
    • my transition, leaving home for an apartment. Mom didn't take me, I went on my own, but I felt intimidated and I had been avoiding it for a long time, returning home after my first stint at college and then the army.
  • possessions/collections v. "bare" necessities:
    • fantasy of owning absolute minimum to survive v. wanting (desiring) to accumulate (especially when it's free) things, ideas, etc.
    • Lisa's possessions in this light
  • friends v. alone:
    • friends can be a burden, especially when they are more needy than you are. Alone, you can be free of the stress of relationship, but you must assure your survival. Without so secure a lifestyle, you "need" friends, for emotional and possibly for occasional physical support.
    • Lisa has no friends and family; my family "kicked me out." We are both "abandoned." But I have a physical security whereas she does not. She is me without my physical (and logical, i.e., rational) constructions.
  • "bad" v. "good" scripts
    • I am a lot of "bad" things, mostly repressed or justified:
      • alone, with imaginary or internet friends;
      • self-excluded in my neighborhood;
      • obsessive re collections, while harboring a fantasy to be devoid of them (schizoid);
      • "immature," i.e., harboring a deep repression of wanting to have remained at home, while laying a rational veneer of independence over it, which is only functional as long as I maintain my "estate." If I go bankrupt tomorrow, I would be emotionally devastated, as I depend totally on my money and my home as a hedge against the world, and the home requires money to maintain it. In other words, I can't be totally devoid of possessions. This is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn, that it is neither extreme that is right, but the mean, the balance between the two;
      • an angry reaction against that which would threaten my continued peaceful, non-stressed situation.
    • I'm not these bad scripts all the time. In fact, they surface very seldom, but they are repressed and functioning operations, held in check by overlaid "good" scripts. This is perhaps the best anyone can hope for, to have learned how to control the "bad" scripts you had adopted early on in the adaptation phase of your childhood by countering them with "good" scripts that work in your favor, checking each move they try to make, keeping everything in balance until the final checkmate.


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