The person who sent it to me was an abusive person who had hurled anger at me that was entirely inappropriate. In an attempt to understand, forgive, heal, and carry on, I had actually prolonged keeping someone in my life that did harm me and had the potential to harm me worse. The values I had held to most of my life were in place and being tested... I had not come to that conclusion yet.
Book burning. Images of piles of books - a bonfire heaped upon. Book burners believe that the publication has the potential to sway other people to an ideology that they think of as wrong. They think others should be spared and defended from the books. And books, Bible especially, are used to sway, to manipulate, to convert. Much has to do with you, the reader, your attitude, your desire to read about subjects, but also around them. To consider. To debate. To be well informed.
You are not necessarily what you read. What you read can turn you into the opposition.
I asked myself if I had ever burned a single book, or otherwise destroyed a book or any publication, because I didn't want anyone else to be exposed to what was written within.
How about when I was a kid?
I couldn't think of any books I burned or destroyed. It was my tendency to donate books I didn't want to keep, or pass them along. I was also excellent about respecting libraries and returning books on time. Sometimes out of boredom I picked up a book at a garage sale or that a friend suggested and was terrifically surprised or pleased because I otherwise might never have read it. I was and am bookish. For years I preferred reading over watching television and did not even own a television. I'm the ideal person to have achieved a BA in Literature.
Before I started listening to audiobooks, which has been the last few years, I had a healthy visual reading habit that meant borrowing hundreds of books from libraries over the years. There were also magazines that I read regularly or frequently.
Over the years my interests changed when it came to reading. Most significantly, I began to read memoirs and non-fiction. I read books and other publications to research niches of history, society, and culture. I was not reading fiction (even as I write fiction). I found it to be true when it came to film too, that I would rather watch a bio-pic, knowing that the screenwriter and filmmaker have to take a stance and cannot show us the past or every character perfectly right or to please everyone. (The Crown being a good example.) I think there is an agreement that this is so, that a two hour film or a five hundred page book or even years of research might not get it right - but one tries. Every reader, every viewer of visual representations, every watcher of film, is participatory in a communication, taking it in, thinking and experiencing and feeling and deciding. If a film is made of a book, I may see the film and read he book - usually the book is better.
I love books.
But I had burned someone's letter, a letter than came out of pondering and a need to vent. A dark letter that reminds one of the George Harrison song, Beware of Darkness, that goes,
Watch out now, take care
Beware of thoughts that linger
Winding up inside your headI met the character I'll call Ray when I stopped in at shop a friend and his family owned. I was in the neighborhood and thought to say hello, but my friend was clearly too busy to talk right away. Ray was also there waiting to talk to him, as a customer. So Ray and I small talked for a few minutes before he advanced to the desk and I waved hello and left. I was suited up and feeling optimistic. I said I was in the neighborhood looking for work and had just had an interview. He gave me his business card and it said he was a designer. (He was not. But he was in the process of working with one. It was probably a ploy to get wholesale pricing.) A couple weeks later, I did that thing called networking. I called him and did my spiel thinking he might be hiring. Some time after that he called me, a little too late at night, so I didn't stay on long, just enough to arrange to meet for coffee. Since most designers I met who were male were gay, I thought that without conviction. Ray lived on the other side of town and we decided to meet up for coffee when he was on my side. From then on, for about six months or so, it seemed Ray and I were companionable and having a good time. We took a hike in Angeles Crest forest and brought along art supplies to do some sketching. We looked for inexpensive restaurant lunches on weekends and events around town. He was gentlemanly. He was not gay.
However, there were some things that happened during that time, before he sent me the nasty letter, that today I would consider proof that a person is not well psychologically.
We decided to have lunch at a restaurant that he was familiar with. It was clear the place was understaffed and the waitress who showed up at our table did quickly say that in a bid for our understanding before she took the order. It was a bright and sunny day, not too hot or cold, a nice breeze. The food was good for the money. We had not made any special demands. I have empathy for wait staff because I know that this is something that I could never do well. I've only gotten upset with one waitress in my lifetime and that was because, after my party had spent easily $150 bucks (probably at least $200 today) she refused to serve me a glass of wine after the meal. The place was not supposed to close for another half hour and no one wanted to leave yet. I'm sure what was going on was that she did not want to open another bottle to sell one glass. I asserted myself but was not abusive. I got my glass of wine and we still left a good tip.
It seemed to be an overall pleasant situation there at lunch with Ray. Other than that we had waited about twenty minutes to order and about twenty minutes for our food. We were in no rush. However, when the waitress brought us our bill, Ray went ballistic over the fact that the tip had been added on - presumed. He not only wrote a nasty note on the receipt but when she came over to talk to us, he was bad enough to upset the waitress. I reasoned with him, he calmed down, we left and nothing more was said about it.
Then, there was the time when I had an interview fairly close to where Ray lived, so I called him and asked him if he would like me to stop over before heading home. When I got there and parked my car at the curb, in a space that was in front of his neighbor's house, and got out and started up the steps, the neighbor came out. She was in fact drunk. There was the strong smell of what was probably on the rocks hitting me like the breath out of a dragon. Her footing was unstable on the flat lawn. She came over to warn me, "Ray," she said, rolling her eyes up at me, "Oh does he have a bad temper." I said, "Really?" But she was drunk.
One afternoon when I was at Ray's the doorbell rang, he went to the door, and then he slammed the door enough to shake the house. Apparently his neighborhood was rife with real-estate agents, one after another, who wanted to introduce themselves and leave their cards, and it was all too much. Ray had lived in apartments for years and it was the first house he had owned and lived in since leaving his parents home years before. An inheritance had made the house possible and it was in a desirable neighborhood. A No Soliciting sign might have been helpful.
Still, months had gone by in which Ray had not shown any anger towards me. If I had any complaint it was that it was clear that his other friends were snobs. It turned out that the day I met him in the shop he had been there to place an order for some items that had been suggested by a "designer friend" of his that he was paying to tweak the house. He was not dating this woman, who had no education in design, though that's not uncommon, but she was the kind of snob who grilled me - someone she was just meeting - about my heritage and money. Who asks someone they just met such questions?
An ex debutant who is divorced!
She was from the South, something about Louisiana maybe, something about oil. I was prepared to be nice but ended up privately thinking of her as "that woman who fucks oil wells." When I had the misfortune to meet her at what was supposed to be a friendly lunch, and she behaved so badly, I got the impression she actually had designs on Ray and considered me to be some kind of competition.
Later he admitted that he had once dated someone who "the woman who fucks oil wells" did not like, and that woman had said the same thing I did, that she had that impression. Get a clue Ray, she was looking for a husband, one with more money then you ever had... Meanwhile I couldn't see what improvements might have been made to the decor of his house. Ray had invested in an alarm system that would lock him in his bedroom if there was an in-home robbery while he slept and some patio furniture.
More of a problem really was when his best male friend showed up one day as we were heading out, while he was in the neighborhood. It was an unexpected visit and suddenly, being the female in the room, we cancelled our plans and it was put upon me to come up with a tasty lunch for the us three, to basically put this male friend of Ray's as a priority. It felt wifey to me which I didn't like but people have to eat, so I did my best with what Ray had in his fridge. His friend left soon after we ate. It turned out the man was also checking me out, and well, he did not think of me as servile enough.
What bullshit you say? I know.
Now, the day I got the nasty letter, the first and only letter that Ray sent, reading it put me into a state of shock, yet I knew that it made no sense, that this could not be the Ray I had come to know. I felt as if I had been physically stabbed in the gut. I bent over the table. I was wounded. Then I got up and took a long bath. Then I called my best girl-friend and told her what happened. She told me to come over right away. She actually prayed for me in their backyard. She said, that when I brought him to a party at her house that summer, she could "see" that he there was a possibility he was an angry man. I didn't ask why she'd thought so or why she hadn't clued me in. I recalled that I had actually lost one contact lens while getting ready to go and had decided to go sans eye glasses which meant I was very myopic and a little dependent on Ray, though we just sat there on a sofa. He had not said or done anything angry on the way there or while we were there. He had not been unfriendly to her other guests... How had she gotten that impression?
Wasn't he a good guy?
Ray "looked good on paper." He already had a Masters degree and was a teacher. He had been the child who care-gave parents and then, when they went into assisted living and nursing homes, spent his days working and his evenings visiting with them. That had gone on for years, and he said that it made it difficult to also have romantic relationships. Also, he said he had once dated someone for seven years but they had gone to couple's counseling and had decided not to marry and ended their relationship. He was intelligent and educated, had been a dutiful and loving son, and was familiar with therapy. He told me he had been thinking about going back to school to become a therapist himself. (The beginnings of my attitude that most people I've met who do degrees in psychology or become therapists have screwy lives themselves and you might be better off going to Confession.) Also, there had been an episode of European travel in his past and he was thinking that he might want to do the tour again, as well as visit some of the people he had met long ago who lived there. I had nothing to say about his future plans. It was his life.
And yet, there I was, blindsided.
Back in the day, letters were to be responded to.
When I finally called Ray, I didn't bother to defend myself from any of the nonsense in the letter. It didn't occur to me that understanding or forgiveness was wrong. I said that based on a good six months I was prepared to just forget he ever sent it if that was where he was at too. I used the words "One more chance." He seemed to be relieved. And then I took my wok out onto my porch, threw the letter in there and set a match to it. I told him I burned the letter - never to be read again.
Thanksgiving came and Ray had no invitations. It happens when you're single and no longer have any family. What had happened to these two friends of his that I had met who held so much judgement of me as not good enough, not rich enough, not elite enough, not servile enough? I invited him along with me to spend Thanksgiving with me at some friends of mine I hadn't seen in a while who were OK about having a stranger at their table that year. I knew that I was risking that they would make way too much out of the fact that I had a man friend, that they might want to make it into a hot romance, even something serious, but well... We went and again he was a polite guest.
It was on the drive home, half way there, that, as they say, the screw turned. Ray announced as if he had been keeping a secret, that he was going to Vegas the next day with his male friend I had met, the friend's girlfriend and a friend of hers, also Filipino, who they had set him up with, for a few days.
His friend's girlfriend? We had stopped at their place one time one day when we went up to Ventura to some beach event. The man's girlfriend was live-in and didn't work for her living elsewhere. She was a mistress who was free to travel with him, probably hoping someday for marriage. She had been a mistress before. He'd had other women living with him - a series of them. She was the kind of woman who lives entirely to meet a man's every need, who you could imagine running his bathwater and putting a thermometer in to make sure it was the exactly right temperature for him. She was not unlikeable and neither was I, but when we went to a salad bar, she ran up to make her man's plate, knowing exactly how many croutons.
I was not like that.
I got my own food at the salad bar. Ray got his.
I'd told Ray that it would be unfair if there would be any expectation upon me to be like that by anyone. I was not a mistress. I was not a live in girlfriend, free to travel. I was not likely going to live unmarried with any man. I had to support myself.
And it had started out that I was networking for work, and having not been offered the best job, I took what I could get. My girlfriend said that was an honorable thing to do. I thought so too.
Apparently I was not rich enough to afford spending on Ray, to gift him more expensive things for his birthday than the sweater I ordered for him from Land's End, or the paella lunch with wine that I had produced - with some veggies from my girlfriend's organic backyard garden, or the tickets to the Dodgers game. (If this sounds uber generous, Ray had picked up the tabs at restaurants, so to me it was only fair.)
My girlfriend, she who had prayed for me, and who had included us in her summer party, and who had given me the garden veggies, decided she hated Ray - though she was careful with the words she used.
As well, there was an older woman, a neighbor in her 70's who still worked, and who I sometimes talked with and was friendly with. Upon hearing about his Vegas venture, she not only told me, with disgust, that he was no good, but she told the neighbors. She was less careful of her words. She said he was the kind of man who went with sluts and I didn't need him as a friend!
I didn't go that far in my thinking.
You see, for me, it was the attitude he had when he told me he was heading for Vegas and his timing. There had been some triumph in his voice when he announced his Vegas trip which most likely did not include separate rooms for him and the woman invited along for the fun. Some "I could have sat alone for Thanksgiving but for you taking sympathy upon me and you're not invited to Vegas."
But then I've never been to Vegas and never thought I was missing out on anything by having never been to Vegas.
I'd had enough of Ray.
I told Ray I hoped he had a wonderful time in Vegas and not to call me when he got back.
I felt a bit down over the whole episode, of having been deluded. I'd taken a part time job that was beneath me, and he had expressed concern that I would wreck my fingernails. Fingernails? Between unemployment benefits and my part time pay, I was able to pay my rent and my car insurance. The holidays were coming. The hustle bustle of the store (a company that's circa 2023 going out of business after a long run of underpaying employees, putting more and more work upon them, and cheating injured workers in workman's comp cases, such as my immediate boss there). At the time some cute young studly department managers who had smiles and laughs, made all the difference. I was ready for the new year and new people.
Then, it might have been February, maybe March, my phone rang. It was Ray. He was slurring. He had never been drunk and he had never used illegal drugs and he had not been on any prescriptions. Not Ray.
He got out the story that he'd had a brain stroke, a bleed, and had been in a coma and almost died. His male friend, the one who had gotten him a date for Vegas a few months earlier, had told him that I had come and sat there in the hospital while he lay in a coma! That was an outright lie. I wasn't aware of what happened when it happened. If any woman came and sat with him as he lay in a coma, it had to have been some other woman. I would deal with the liar another time. I listened and I felt sorry for him but I told him, "It wasn't me." To which, he made no comment.
I could only imagine him going into a rage about something and then having the brain stroke, though, it can happen as someone is sleeping. Still, I wondered if having this medical issue did have something to do with his anger or anger management. Despite some advantages, for there are many children who do right by their parents and self sacrifice who never get an inheritance or a house, Ray had clearly felt he was owed better than he'd gotten out of life. And that was the thematic of his nasty letter, except in it he'd had higher expectations of me. Any past therapy - couples or otherwise - had not rid him of a sense of entitlement. He - and perhaps his friends - had Narcissistic Personality Disorders.
I was not the person who owed him. Or could make it all up to him.
Then, and maybe this will shock you as it did me, Ray said that his insurance had put him in a rehab very far from home. And he wanted to go home. And they would not let him go home because he was not married, did not have a wife waiting to take care of him at home. Without siblings, he had no one. And he had told them at the rehab, that he could go home and I would be there to take care of him!
He had clearly lost some memory.
Who did he think I had been to him? This put me into a state of confusion.
After I got off the phone with Ray, I called the rehab and asked to speak to someone about his case. They put me on with a man who was assigned to him,a nurse or physical therapist. I doubt this would happen today. Today they would not tell me anything because I'm not family. First I confirmed that he was really there and that he'd had a brain stroke - that he had told me the truth. Then I told the man what Ray had said to me. I told the man that any relationship with Ray was long over and that I was in no way going to take care of him if he was released to go home. I told him I thought Ray had suffered memory loss about our relationship as a result of the stroke. The man became sober. I guess he'd believed Ray.
I sent Ray a get-well card, wishing him well.
I sent his liar friend a letter and told him I had not been there sitting with Ray in the hospital while he was in a coma and that he had to straighten that out with him. I mentioned that Ray had told me he had plans to go back to college to get a Masters in Psychology and travel in Europe. He'd had plans that never included me. I said we had moved on.
And I let it go.
Or so I thought.
I have no idea when Ray was released to go home, or how long it had been before he called me. He called. Sadly, because of his slur, he'd been fired from his teaching job. They said the students could not understand him. And also that he was not allowed to drive.
I felt for him. I really did. But...
I did not call him.
And he started calling me.
I got a full time job and stopped working the part time one. At some point I became aware that he was calling and hanging up because I was not answering. I was not answering mostly because I was not home but once I realized the hang up calls were from him, as the phone number came up, I didn't want to answer. He was obsessed. He become a bit of a stalker.
A package arrived one day, from Ray. Apparently I'd left a paperback in his car, which I'd forgotten about. From this experience I was known to tell people, "Don't go looking for bobby pins in the carpet." In other words, don't look for any little thing to reconnect with someone you were in any type of relationship with, when it ended badly. If there is something you left behind or need, get it, then go. The next time a package arrived from Ray, I told the mailman I needed to Return To Sender it.
Ray got his drivers license and bought a new car. Though he still lived across town, he was seen driving past my building a few times in an animated way, as if he were proving how well he was doing and how great he had it. It was probably an attempt to show off to me.
It was pathetic and desperate. And it hid the fact that while, at the time, I was open to anything so long as it was right, Ray and his friends did have an agenda to get him married to someone but not just anyone. They didn't want any women friends in his life. Until his disability somehow made it OK for him to consider me as a care-giver, who no doubt would be supremely giving and unselfish.
I was not afraid of Ray and never thought to involve the police.
It must have been near a year or maybe more when I spontaneously decided to answer the phone when Ray called. By then he had probably called a few hundred times. I felt ready.
I heard myself say, "My heart is elsewhere now." It was a lie but a simple and necessary one.
He said, "I thought of that."
I also told him I thought he needed psychological help. He admitted he had thought of that too.
The phone calling stopped.
Around 2008 I and another friend got a picnic together and decided to go over to an area of Griffith Park not too far from the zoo to eat. There was event there and from about fifty feet away I saw that Ray was there with a group of friends. I suggested we find another place to have our sandwiches and left.
At some point I decided to find out if Ray was still alive.
He wasn't.
I have a theory about the life-review after-death experiences that some people have been reporting. In truth, what they're reporting is an experience that humans go through before the brain and other bodily systems are totally shut down. There is now evidence that there may be consciousness for some time after bodily death. I.e. You know you are dead, even after your head was chopped off. Maybe we are rigged that way but then, after the tunnel of light and meeting with the previously deceased including our pet dogs, maybe there is a point where there is nothing rather than eternal life. I haven't heard any such stories from people who were actually "dead" for longer than a few minutes. Are these glimpses into another reality?
Forgiveness is almost always part of the story these people tell.
I think forgiveness is overrated.
James van Praagh, one of the premier psychic mediums, says we get to feel every pain and every joy that we caused others while we were alive, that is our punishment or reward, as well as eventually coming up with the next-life plan in which we are to learn more lessons.
I wonder if Ray got a dose.
C 2023 Christine Trzyna
P.S. I do believe some people, sometimes, can retrieve a friendship once some time has passed. Opinions do change at times, and sometimes this is wisdom.
And that letters, written to further understanding, can open communications.
And that it can be important to listen and allow another person to say what they need to say.
***
Slightly edited last fifth of this tome on May 2, 2023. A little punctuation, etc, for clarity.
