I COULDN’T HELP BUT NOTICE
September 4, 2008 - Leave a Response
I blame the terrorists for the break-up of Pamela Palmer and myself. That entire event transformed her from a vaguely pro-big government Leftist to an equally vague yet ardent hawk.
I was never a liberal, but the fact that I didn’t give into the fear and hysteria that accompanies the general mood these days was also a contributing factor in our separating-permanent like. The other factor, of course, was her thinking I called her co-workers “kooks,” when in essence, I was really calling the Mormon housewives that, and I was, in fact, calling her co-workers in the government “spooks.” But in the day of communications bouncing from glitch-y phone conversations often lead to raging misunderstandings, I guess.
But yeah, my sorrow on that anniversary of death and mangled metal was not for the poor office workers hustling to get ahead in the center of the World’s finances. Those poor schmucks were an abstraction to me… I did not know any of them, and my sorrow for their plight was only slightly more than that I would feel in a movie about some wasp-y debutante struck down by cancer in the prime of her waspishness.
It happened on the television. I watched it happen on television – and therefore it worked on an abstract dimension. Nobody knows more than a ProTools-fuck how divorced from reality anything is broadcast on television. After decades of being told that the gore and murder on the television screen was not real… one gets conditioned and, yes, de-sensitized. It was just another car crash, and I did not mourn it much more than the ones from the chase scenes in the Eddie Murphy movies.
But I did mourn what was taken away from me, which was the chance for Pamela and I to build a life together. She is beautiful and somewhat quiet – two attributes I have come to appreciate in the fairer sex.
When “quiet” is taken a step further to “cut-off” and “uncommunicative” – then the quality is not quite as admirable, of course….
Still: she is the woman I wanted to marry, and my heart has been heavy ever since our split. We haven’t been together since the Olympics and even making it that far was a struggle. But I have not been the same person since. I miss her. Sometimes terribly. And I get older every day. And the possibility of attaining the same sense of romance and transcendence seems more fleeting every day.
It is the pain of that sentiment that has inspired me to take up cycling in the mountain ranges that envelope Los Angeles in earnest. To fight off depression by cranking up the endorphins and the adrenaline. To be completely alone on an isolated mountain road. To stare down solitude.
And so it is on September 11th, 2002, one year to the day after my life with Pamela Palmer was altered permanent-like. I didn’t dare turn on the television, as my mental state was delicate enough and any more gratuitous flag-waving would be just the catalyst to send me spiraling into a black hole of existential depression.
I could feel it coming – this was going to be a tough day, alright. I got on my bike and road for miles and miles, my body straining to find enough ooommppphhh to propel myself upward, as if to leave the banality of the human condition down in the flatlands of Los Angeles. Let those people who lacked the wherewithal and foresight to tune this entire day out to their own neurotic devices and fear-driven chatter.
I rode and rode and climbed and climbed, spitting, cursing, sweating. “I love you, Pamela Palmer, you fucking cunt,” I would shout over the creaking of a bicycle chain as it strained against cogs and gears. There was nobody there to judge my Torrets Syndrome-ish burst of the agony of unrequited love. The only arbitration would be from the echoes of my own voice, as my shouts bounced off of the jagged rocks of the hillsides. The stones remained mute and cast no judgement, but the crevices of some rock formations seemed to raise an eyebrow at my lack of emotional restraint. Regardless, I would ride on, blowing snot out of my nose and cursing a red streak on the name of the woman I loved more than any in my history of matters amour.
Finally, I exhausted myself. I parked at a park bench near an abandoned entrance to a ski lift. I caught my breath and meditated, my blood coursing with a tingling exuberance that pinged and ponged off every pleasure center in my body. I was high as heroin addict, all from taking my body places it never thought about going.
I was alone and I was content, nay I was blissed out – on a day that seemed to preclude any attempt at anything resembling happiness.
On this lonely mountain road, I heard the distance puttering of what seemed to be a under-powered small car, whose struggles to climb the hill reverberated against the shale and stones.
I look downward and saw a beater of a Japanese car groaning and grunting. As loud as the chugging engine was the sound of wind, more specifically the sound of an American flag flapping like a helicopter rotor. The flag was jerry-rigged to the car’s antenna. I watched the car climb, climb and climb and motor right past my point of solitude. The pitch of the engine and the flapping seemed to change as the driver continued on, around the next bend.
Then, apropos of who knows what, I heard the car coming back. The driver, a middle-aged woman with creases carved in her face from alcohol, cigarette smoke and who know what kinds of chemical abuse pulled over next to my park bench. I was stunned, my personal meditation interrupted on account of what whacked-out agenda this piece of white trash has foisted upon me.
“Excuse me, sir.”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t have an American flag on your bicycle.”
“So?”
“Well, I would like to offer you one?”
“Where the fuck would I put it?”
She looked hurt, but I just shook my head and turned my back on her. I heard the piece-of-shit Toyota fire up and putter off, the flap-flap-flapping serving as an arrhythmic counterpoint to an atonal 4 cylinder engine trying to catch up with the revolutions of its own crankshaft.
I cycled back home and called Pamela Palmer. I wanted her to come over and pick up a leather jacket and other clothing and toiletries she had left at my house and I had never thrown out. I wanted any trace of her removed from my house. I got her voicemail. I was in no mood to talk to a machine.
As I shut the lid on my phone, the very instrument that led to our misunderstanding in the first place, I threw the phone against my living room wall and laughed when it splintered into a dozen pieces.
“Can you hear me now?” I yell at the broken detritus. -30-
