"Stop this and we can still be friends," I told Micky.
That was me knowing life's a bitch and then you die, said in a spirit of generosity. I meant it, there was art in our friendship, but she didn't stop. She was having an affair with a man not her husband, irresponsibly, and she'd recently told me the two of them were including me into their fantasy.
To explain to others what appeared to be my sudden departure from her life, but had been a long sad realization on my part that Micky was using me and didn't care about my reputation, she lied some more.
She called it "making something up" and I suspect she had been doing so since childhood. She felt no guilt. She shrugged. She was going to do whatever she wanted and get away with it even if it was a horrible way to treat a person who'd believed in you - your work - your writing - and had participated in a genuine friendship.
I felt relieved to be freeing myself from an entanglement not at all to my making or liking. I didn't want these two screwing with thoughts of me in their heads. To me that was Black Magic. It was absolutely not OK with me.
After a while, after she had not stopped, the phone rang a hundred times that I know about.
Hang up calls.
Withdrawal.
I got a message from her boy brother telling me I had been insensitive. What did he know? I'm sure not the truth. Vague rumors of bisexuality or repressed homosexually were also in his aura. What had she said to him about me to enlist his pity?
I decided not to use the word "girlfriend" any more as it could be misunderstood in Los Angeles.
I didn't call him back.
//
I met Micky at a poetry reading before I burned out on that scene.
Reading her wet lines to an audience that included a smiling cat of a husband who was always using nip, you would have assumed she was enjoying the best sex with him and he knew it. Her poems encouraged everyone to be more daring, self revealing, and sexy as writers but were based on the fantasies of a sex starved woman who was interested openly in males and secretly in females.
What an imagination.
Micky was one of the most creative woman I've ever known.
I don't know if she knew her survival required constant invention but after a year, I did.
Seems the black and white Lucy Show reruns were on her television set whenever I visited and she watched as if she were taking a master class in getting around a husband.
How had so much intelligence and artistic talent and beauty come to this?
She'd laugh, knowing what was coming next on that show.
Her lips glistened her words as they left her mouth.
//
Micky was the neglected wife of a husband whose life philosophy was to stay in the denial of a constant high on pot. He loathed reality and mixed it up with the threat of an overdose of got-lemons-make-lemonade. He was always smiling. Nothing was going to get him down. Retreating into his role of provider, he preferred dumb.
He was not interested in sex, not with her, not in years. He couldn't imagine she had needs besides money.
He was a good provider and she could count on that.
There were always rumors with no reference, such as that they had an "arrangement." They did. Unsaid.
She was told by her parents that she was lucky she didn't need to bring in income. Lucky to have him. Her parents put all their money on their boy. Their boy expected the marriage to last. Their boy went to college while she had a boss who tossed her to clients. It was a sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle that ended in a celibate marriage.
//
I'll tell you how to prevent your daughter from ever being Micky. Love your girl. See her potential. Raise her knowing her own value. Give her the strength of an education and foundation - some basis for ethics and morals. The Golden Rule.
//
Her sins of surviving a marriage were like a twelve car pile up on the 405 - hard to figure who did what but full of permanent injury. You know you shouldn't look but also you can't help yourself - you look.
//
For the hell of it, I courageously sent a poem into a tiny time chap book publisher who was soliciting entries (first publication rights only) and was surprised when it was accepted. I'd written the poem on a high tide afternoon in Malibu that I'd spent watching surfers from a perch on a cliff.
Micky called me and was faking a conversation on her end to be overheard by her husband, suggesting we two drive to the publication reading and spend the weekend away but what she was trying for was a weekend away with her lover. Her script confused me. What the hell?!
I went alone.
Some time after that I went over to her place to work on an art project and found it curious that her husband was actually not smiling but sitting at their table holding a check book, his thumb repeatedly ruffling the pages while he glared at me to make a point. I pretended not to notice.
Like the previously written about woman friend who was using me as an excuse for where she was and to account for gifts she bought for a lover, Micky was also. That's why when it became glaring obvious that I was no longer around she spun more web.
This situation, I eventually learned, was worse than the last. Micky wasn't buying a men's wallet for her lover at Macy's. She was spending hundreds of dollars. She was buying cocaine and abortion.
//
There are so many things I've never experienced.
I'm so glad.
And, Oh! It is not true that you have to have experiences so you can write about them.
C 2021
Notes: A few years ago I learned that Micky, having secured a max of social security and half the assets, did divorce. I so hope she's found peace and real love and is making art.
