51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (14 page)

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Authors: Kristen McGuiness

BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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I don’t know if my father has any sense left, or if the “sail away” escape plan is so embedded in the mind of all prisoners, it is pointless to argue. I wonder whether they play
Shawshank Redemption
on rerun in there, fighting over who gets the latest maritime news, waiting, waiting for the day that they all get to sail away, leaving behind the disappointed children and the angry ex-wives and the worlds of pie crust promises they have created in their wake.
 
I try to breathe, “Dad, I don’t want to sail away. I just want you to be normal. I want us to have a normal life.”
 
“K, a normal life?” he moans. “Oh God, what’s happened to you?”
 
I sniff my last sob and try with all my strength to say, “I grew up, Daddy. So should you.”
 
My Shaman Lidia sits across from me, and I think she might be slightly stunned.
 
“Wow.”
 
“I know,” I agree. This is my second date with Lidia today. And like all second dates, I find myself much more at ease.
 
She smiles at me, “Although you do know, right? You know there is no such thing as a normal life?”
 
“I know, Lidia, but there’s got to be one where my dad isn’t playing the FBI so that he can smuggle drugs on the side. I mean there’s got to be something out there more normal than that.”
 
Lidia agrees, but as she explains, my father might not know how to find it. In recovery, we have a tendency to be wary of therapy because it allows for almost too much self-analysis. And self-analysis can easily lead to self-pity, which is next door to despair and pretty much in earshot of fucking shit up. My experience with therapists is that they were no better than mental prostitutes. I paid them to listen to my shit. They nodded and made me feel that all of my problems were of the world’s making, and I would leave feeling more righteous in my mistakes but not necessarily better and certainly not different.
 
I think Lidia might be well worth her $120 an hour. Because instead of telling me that I am right, instead of telling me about how I probably suffer from one disorder or another and that my father is a sociopath and my mother is a codependent, instead of telling me all the things I have heard before from people with fancy degrees on their walls and much more formal clothing, Lidia tells me about Sach’amama—the great two-headed snake that the Incan shamans believe is the Goddess of the Jungle. Sach’amama, Lidia explains, is our great god spirit of the South. She is the guide who shows us how to shed our skins, how to learn new ways, how to find a different path in the jungle when the old one no longer serves us.
 
“It sounds like, by the way you stood up to your father, you have already met her,” Lidia says and smiles. I have. I know that. I know that as confused as my last month has been, as painful as it has been, I feel like I am on a new path, even if I’m not quite sure where it is going. Lidia stands up and removes the small glasses from her face. The long skin of a dead snake decorates her walls, along with many pictures of a large black cat. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, and I watch her strong arms as she moves the pillows off the couch to create a place for me to lie on the floor. I want to help her, but I don’t know how. I don’t quite know where I fit in this space yet.
 
The night before I had a dream that I was twelve again. I was at the house of a friend that I had during that time. Her name was Beth, and I always had a crush on her older brother. In the dream, I have just hooked up with that brother in their parents’ bed, and all I remember is seeing his face as he stands up and backs away from me.
 
“Because up until that moment, he had thought I was his age,” I explain. “And then he sees that I am a child, and I can see the fear and shame and horror on his face.”
 
Lidia is laying out her sacred stones as she asks, “And what were you thinking?”
 
“That I have seen that same confused look on so many of the men I have dated. It’s like they think they’re getting a woman, and then they wake up the next morning only to find this twelve-year-old child lying there.”
 
“Scared,” Lidia says.
 
“Terrified.”
 
“You fucking bet,” she replies. This is only our second date, and I know I am in love with this woman.
 
I lie down, and Lidia tells me to call to that great snake and ask her to lead me where I need to go. And she does, and we do, and I go find that twelve-year-old girl inside. The one who couldn’t create real honesty with Jimmy, the one who didn’t know how to respond when Oliver told me I talked like a teenager, the one who deferred to Jake One because she was too scared to stand up for herself.
 
I reach out to her, and I don’t even know where I am. Somewhere between imagination and dream, but I see her. I see me. I am twelve years old, and I am the disappointed child waiting on the shore. Waiting for the man I love so much to come and get me, to sail me away to a brighter place. But when I fear he isn’t going to show up for me, I hide that bright place because I cannot trust anyone with it, most especially me. And then I am sucking the light back in, trapping it inside, and all that is left is that wounded twelve-year-old girl wondering why they’re backing away from me.
 
We are closing up the session. I lie there, my body slack, the energy between my heart and hands, still very much alive.
 
“Will you do something for me?” Lidia asks.
 
“Of course,” I reply.
 
“Do you feel the energy coming from your hands into your heart right now?”
 
I do.
 
“Okay, I want you to start holding that heart every day for five minutes and think that you’re holding that little girl. If you give her love, you will have the chance to become one with her, and then you cannot hide from her, just as she cannot hide from you.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“And remember, now that you’ve started this work, some of your biggest challenges will come into play. You have asked for an adventure of the spirit. That isn’t always easy.”
 
“I don’t have a choice, Lidia.” And I don’t. Because that little girl is the innocence and the vulnerability, and ultimately, she is the great gatekeeper for the light. And I kind of want her on my side; I kind of need her there. I don’t know that calling this great snake guide my God will lead me any closer, but I also know that I need to shed some skins. Even if it hurts, even if it’s awkward and uncomfortable, and I just want to hiss and bite as it all falls away, I think I might owe myself that much. And if that means I need to hold my raw and soft-shelled heart every morning for five minutes to help me grow, to help me become the woman I want to be, then just as willingness has served me before, I will pray to Sach’amama that it will serve me again.
 
18
 
Date Eighteen: The Well
 
I met Oliver over four years ago. It was my twenty-sixth birthday, and I was on a job interview. I sat in the reception area of a Westside production company, waiting to meet with the assistant that I was interviewing to replace. She was running late, and I had no clue what was about to happen. I still wonder whether things might be different today had I not found myself on that chair, in that lobby, reading that
Variety
when Oliver walked in. He wore a sweater vest and a button-down shirt, and I want to say corduroys but maybe that’s just because it seems to fit with the rest of the outfit. And I looked up.
 
I looked up, and the world slowed. The sun came in from behind him, and though I wasn’t actually around in the time of Christ, I kind of imagine that he had a similar effect because without knowing it or understanding it, my savior had just walked into the room. And apparently, my savior was a Hollywood producer with a sweater vest and brown curly hair.
 
And Oliver? He looked confused, lost, thrown, as though he knew where he was going, but then he saw me and something flew out. The ground between us shrinking, and all I could think was, “Who? Is? That?” Little did I know, but he was actually the guy with whom I was interviewing, but the job got put on hold, and I never became his assistant. Months later, when I had moved into a new position at another film company in town, we met for drink at a Hollywood bar called The Well, where tonight, I go to meet Rob.
 
Rob is a new man, provided once again by the incredible menu that is
The Onion
personals. I stand outside awkwardly waiting for my date, much like I sat in that lobby years before. As with Oliver, I have already been able to tell that my date is fatally smart. With multiple degrees and a cutting sense of his own intelligence, I actually look forward to sparring with this one. Plus, he’s late. And I kind of like it when they’re late. I text him to tell him where he can find me because I understand the pains of searching for someone you’ve never met before. It’s pretty much the motto of my romantic state.
 
I receive a text in response, “Has anyone hit on you yet?” I begin typing in my reply as a man backs up to stand next to me. I can tell this is Rob. He waits, staring at his phone looking for my text to come through. He doesn’t say anything but he doesn’t need to. I like him immediately.
 
Rob is an organic nutritionist, which might be kind of tough for me, and for him, considering I am probably the only professional in Los Angeles who still eats McDonald’s. But that’s just his most recent profession. Rob actually has a PhD in political theory from Cornell but gave up being a professor at a small Ohio college to come west and teach rich people how to eat. I walk us through the bar, past the corner where Oliver and I met years ago, and I try desperately not to feel the pang of memory that I know will hit. But for some reason, the energy of the man walking behind me keeps the sensation at bay, and I almost forget. I almost forget how I once walked into that bar four years before and found Oliver standing at the jukebox waiting for me.
 
“You know some people take being late as an insult.” Oliver turned around from the music he was selecting to begin what would become a tradition of snarky criticisms.
 
“Are you insulted?” I threw back because as I stood there in my three-inch heels I was slightly taller than him, and it felt good. I tossed my recently highlighted hair behind my shoulder. I could feel him inhale. And as I smiled at him, my eyes going soft, I knew that he was going to be mine.
 
But as I walk with Rob, my date for tonight, I almost don’t think about that. I think about the heat coming off of him as he leads us over to the small section available for us to sit.
 
“What do you want to drink?” Rob asks.
 
“I don’t drink.” I’m still not particularly skilled at informing people of this small detail.
 
“At all?” he asks. “Not even water?”
 
“I drink Red Bull.”
 
“You got it.”
 
Rob gets back from the bar, and I have made more room on the small booth we are forced to share. Normally, I find that my dates are either too intimidated or insecure or uninterested to get close to me off the bat, but Rob isn’t like that. He’s confident and cool and moves right in next to me. His hand falls on my leg accidentally, but he lets it linger and makes fun of himself for grabbing a thigh grope so quickly. He laughs at himself a lot, and at me. And I like him all the more.
 
He explains his change in profession (breakup, mid-life crisis, father dying) and how much feeding his body right has shown him everything he hoped to once figure out through academia. “It’s always about systems of movement,” he explains. “The economics of nutrition. What keeps us healthy, societies healthy, and what poisons us from within, it’s all the same.”
 
My secret dream in life is to run away to grad school and study political systems, so what Rob is describing is akin to intellectual porn for me. We begin to look around us, and we both laugh at the desperate scene in which so many of us single folk are forced to participate. These rituals of standing at the bar, making small talk with friends while our eyes slide to check out what’s walking by. We laugh at all the porkpie hats that guys are sporting these days, and the women standing around in the awkward hopes that they might be asked to dance. But we don’t dance anymore, and it’s too hard to go up to anyone without assuming it’s just for sex. Because that’s normally all you’re going to find on a Friday night in Hollywood. Rob has their number, and he also has mine, which means I can only be myself. And it feels nice.
 
I sit back and try to decide if I find Rob attractive. He has a good body, strong forearms, and sexy hands, and though he’s forty, he has a nice, solid face, with just the right type of wrinkles. Ones that make him look sweet and almost endearingly younger than his age.
 
He is also wearing the right shoes. Pull-up suede boots. He’s not that tall, but his personality is, and when he moves closer to me, he feels warm and sturdy next to me. God, I love that feeling. Of the human form against my own. Rob puts his arm around the back of the bench so that it graces my shoulders.

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