Pot Roast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_roast

After college, me and my state school boyfriend once again lived in the same town; he after Montreal and McGill University, and me after R.I.S.D. and Providence, Rhode Island, except everything had changed. He struggled to define himself through MCAT's and what kind of grad school major he should choose from (he's now in that end of show business that enforces union contracts = ugh), and I was becoming an apprentice in publishing, which is about as far apart as the talent is from the office workers around them as it gets. One person watches the action safely from afar while hiding behind the scenes, or off-camera in the shadows, and the other person falls on her ass repeatedly in front of everyone, with jeers and cheers given out in equal measure.

Besides that, he hated art. After a time, my very open "Art Fag" fashion design friend from art school had moved into my aunt's apartment with me (I thought she could help me out with expenses), and he hated her, too, but he had opened the door widely to other personalities a while ago. He justified to me that his roaming eye for other girls was from being a virgin when we met, but that was years ago. He had attended a very expensive, all-boys Jesuit prep school in Manhattan, while I busted my ass working after-school jobs in a very good but very public school system here in 70s and 80s-era working class Rockland County. He lived in the house his grandparents had built for their family, with their prominently displayed, large, gilded Quebecois fleur-de-lis painted in the living rooms' four corners, while his very large French Canadian ex-Marine dad sat regally in his recliner watching whatever he said he wanted to, attended to by his much smaller and mousier Irish-American mother, who snapped briskly to whatever house chores needed doing.

They had six children who still lived with their parents, with the exception of their already-married sister, which is the tradition for most strict Roman Catholic families. His parents were very much that, and loudly proud of it, too. French Canadians, like Irish people, still suffer from the stigma attached to multiple child births without practicing birth control, which created a lot of largely impoverished families wherever we went around the globe, but such was not the case with his Union-funded father and his very large family. As the youngest, Bart did his chores like I did mine (he was assigned laundry duty = ugh), because all hands are needed to pitch in for a large house to run, and our families were no exceptions to the rule. Work hard, play hard. Got it.

Easy, right? But for him, it wasn't. He struggled with sometimes the simplest decisions, like what to eat and when to do it, or with whom and how many are invited? He justified his unfaithfulness to me in Montreal as necessary experiences that would satisfy me in his future as my husband, because I had been forced by circumstances not of my own choosing to become a "Lady of the Household" before I felt that I was really ready for it, which was part of the abuse behind it: to drive me out of the house and into much deeper adult waters in a world where I would get hurt and ultimately recover from, as is my natural way. I didn't really care about dating while attending in the world's hardest design university, as yet another high performing place where I worked three part-time jobs in between an unheard of school schedule that was just studio classes (please don't try it), which were much harder, longer, and labor-intensive, and which was the total opposite of his relatively easy studies that were typical for liberal arts students, where one could hide in the back of a darkened classroom taking notes and writing papers for grades; simple as pie on Thanksgiving for someone like me.

I knew back home in Brooklyn that I had to break up with him when school was done, because he wouldn't be able to move forward with me, and that he would make it prolonged for me to do so, by being his usual gruelingly overly verbal and excessively repetitive self, becoming highly difficult to handle emotionally because he cannot process change nor adapt to others around him well, or sometimes at all. It was painful and childish and I had grown up. Enough. He forced me into dating much more powerful academics than him while I was at R.I.S.D. and so I had, but that was that. I walked through a doorway you can't close shut, even as I warned him that that would be the case with me, because I know how to move on if I have to.

It became crystal clear to me about what I had to do with him, during one afternoon at a park in Bay Ridge down by the water, as we sat in the warm afternoon sun discussing the next weekend's plans. My roommate was busy getting her ass kicked at a sweater company in the city, where she was pushed to the side by better designers with much bigger personalities who fought way harder for what they wanted, because working class native New York kids have to do that just to get a seat at the table at dinnertime, and she had none of that. Neither did he, but because of his exclusive roots, he didn't need them. Plush union jobs during school were easy to get for him, at a rich-kid $20/hour working the door. Irish? You're in!

Not so with me, and I was getting pestered regularly by my friend who was already not making it in the city, because the hungrier and more talented designers were ripping her apart on the daily. She needed enabling, and with the fast track I was on as a publishing apprentice, there was no way I could tend to her on my own anymore, what with the amount of mental problems and breakdowns she was having without a full circle of friends to prop her up anymore to keep her going through her own life. And so, one sunny afternoon in Bay Ridge, I tried to introduce her into his routine badly, or as good as it was going to get given the concrete infallibilities that hid his compulsive routines. Could she come to dinner with me at your parent's place? Uh oh. He immediately stiffened, bristling at the amount of work and smoothing over that the introduction of a new person would be into his insular family circle; a stale, old place where all the grown working men still lived with their parents, with the exception of his older sister who was married. No way. Not happening, Marie. Not enough time to introduce it and then groom them with this new information.

OK....fine. How about the three of us go to dinner somewhere, like the working young adults we'd become? That was even worse. He reddened, looking away at the water, struggling to disseminate this new information given to him in his old neighborhood, "B-b-b-but I look forward to my mother's pot roast all week! I have to have my mother's pot roast every Sunday! I look forward to it all week long!", and that was it. I broke up with him the very next weekend, and I had to nurse my crippled roommate into helping me inform everyone in my circle that I had just broken up with my best friend from school, because he can't go the places I can go, and that was that. I spent the next years (YEARS) coaching everyone around me about why Bart and I had to part ways, because he isn't gifted enough to be in my world, and isn't that the way for each and every mother out there in the world, reading this right now?

You're trying to have a good cry over a glass of white wine alone in a room, and also comforting the dysfunctional people around you through your major life change. I made it through (this site is proof enough of that), but this year, guess what this hard-working girl's gonna be doing in her own apartment? Whatever I want to, friends, and "Amen" to that! I made it through alive to tell you all the tale, and thank G-d for that. There was never enough air in his parent's stuffy drawing room for me, anyway. Have one on me this year, girlfriend. You deserve it, too.

Michelle the Hat

Like I mentioned yesterday, I don't have the time or the space to be a voracious book reader these days, though for many time periods in my life, it was my almost my sole domain, so much so, that it formed the basis for my scholarship, vocation, and religious worship. Occasionally I read other people's works, though not so much these days, with a few exceptions like "Twelve Years a Slave" and my long-term appreciation of Stephen King, whether or not I've read his most recent works. It's like being a U2 fan even if you miss the lavish stadium shows, or you hate their latest album because it sucks: you're still a fan, just not of that, or while you're working during your most creatively productive times. I didn't watch t.v. during most of the 90s, when I was in school and working hard. I've had cable t.v. in the past, but not right now. It's like phases of the moon that I pass through, noticed or not.

When King dropped his follow-up to "The Shining" (his period that I read the most, because I was a house-bound kid riding out childhood with one of my favorite Mainers and modern practitioners of New England Gothic), I knew I was going to read it at some point, life and work distractions be damned. It's like candy for me, and the hardcover edition jacket was a fucking bloody mess that immediately caught my eye on the shelf, which makes me love/hate book cover design all over again. I checked it out, and reading it was like trying on an old jacket of mine that'd been hanging in the back of my mother's closet for years that I forgot about, but recently rediscovered on a visit to find that it still fits me like a glove. It went down smooth, like greatly aged Irish whiskey on the rocks, drunk on a chilly autumn night in a certain Celtic-inspired hamlet with lots of misty fog from the river winding through it periodically. I inhaled it like I lived it, which I do.

And so I know really great life analogies when I read them, because I live life like a crazy Yankee who's a lot like the heroes of his horror stories, in my very own version of a funky New England "Halloweentown" that's always atmospheric and a little spooky, like the colorful fall leaves that are falling down around the old gravestones marking our distant and oft-forgotten Dutch, French, Indian ancestors. They're there, whether we recognize it of not. Denizens lurking around the edges of our lives are like that, too, like the wacky patrons who come here to the library because they have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. They're not like me at all, except for the very vague connection that we may or may not be sitting amongst the stacks at the same time, and that's exactly who "Michelle the Hat" is to me.

She's like a rotten character from some other writer's book life, because she has absolutely nothing to do with me, besides that fact that she and I may (or may not) be in Rockland County and alive at approximately the same time. I knew her as soon as I saw her (and smelled her), just as I knew that she would force a conversation with me, because she's the kind of ugly dyke on welfare who knows me and my work but stubbornly refuses to acknowledge it to my face, because she's a rotten fucking bitch. She purposefully stalks women in town by memorizing their daily schedules, and then acts on that information aggressively, much like the obnoxious odor always around her of rotting teeth and early death. 

She's disgusting to look at and she knows it, that's why she forces herself on us, like that fucked up and rather nondescript co-worker who smells badly on purpose just to ruin your day: she's another petty, vicious, gross-out artist among many, with nothing better to do than be the kind of annoying fucking bitch you want to go away or just die off already, since she's hellbent on doing that for a living, in lieu of an actual job or any real purpose in life. So, when I read about the lead bitch in "Doctor Sleep" who kills off humans by feeding off their souls, like the local toxic welfare cases around town who fucking hate us but lurk around us anyway, I already knew Stephen King's character called "Rose the Hat" (infamous in her ghoulish circle for wearing a man's old top-hat like a circus ringleader, and for sleeping with both men and women indiscriminately, because she'll take whatever life form she can get), because I knew it was the just the right fit for this fucking evil bitch at my local library.

And sure enough, she hits on men, women, and children alike, like the desperate foul-smelling ghoul seeking an early death she really is: not exactly human, but here among us somehow anyway, lingering like the backed-up sewer smell from the last big Nor'easter that ran through town, overfilling the drains and flooding the streets with the half-rotten corpses of every animal that died in the recent flood. On one particular afternoon, she left behind the ugly black Beatles cap that she wears every day to cover up her fat, round, misshapen head, and if I could bottle what "evil" smells like, that would be it. I smelled her hat before I saw it, and it was so aggressively bad, I used a pencil to push it behind a computer sign for patrons a few computers away, after quickly nudging it further and further away from me for a few lines or so before that final push with a big holding breath.

On another day, one of the other homeless disordered women who frequents here (a much nicer person than Michelle, actually), finally turned to her while I was working to tell her that I wasn't the only person offended by her deliberately bad smell; she's also offensive to other humans and lifeforms, too, so whatever performance piece she thought she was doing solely for me was failing badly. The odor that permeates everything around her is like a combination of really bad halitosis (she has rotten teeth that turned brown many years ago), toxic diarrhea from an old unchanged diaper, and the stank from a slowly rotting corpse in the sun, of a human being who ate only the worst junk food before she got cancer and died in her early 30s.

It was so bad that after I got home from the library, I could still smell it on me. I brushed my hair several times to get rid of it, scenting my brush with hairspray first and then a few spritzes of perfume....to no avail. I changed my clothes, put on some more deodorant, sprayed on some more scent, and then brushed my teeth again. Her rotten odor lingered like the bad taste in my mouth, finally forcing me to take a really long bath to wash it out of my hair through several good rinsings in mid-afternoon, a habit I am not accustomed to, because I bathe every morning (barring extreme circumstances or rarely occurring events), and I brush my teeth after every meal. Even when I smoked, all my friends told me that they thought I was a non-smoker (which I genuinely always felt myself to be), because I never had the really foul smell of a typically addicted chain-smoker attached to me, again, because I managed it like I tend to all the other aspects of my life.

I used to wash my hands after smoking outside in fresh air (with no children around to breathe in my second-hand smoke), and I was also a frequent user of breath mints and/or mouthwash to obscure the taste of cigarette smoke some more. I've also always burned either candles and incense, too, as well as performing regular seasonal house cleanings, because I like to have healthy habits even at my lowest points, and so I drew no other conclusion than the obvious one, dear readers: "Michelle the Hat" is pure evil, albeit of the boring foul kind that creeps around the dark corners of your hometown, like a certain infamously terrifying clown from classic horror fan fiction; a thing that hunted children by lurking in the darkness and murk of your town sewers. Beware this Halloween of the monsters you might already know, not the ones you don't. It's evil enough.