Out Dark Spot

The move is made. Infinitely better to be out of Le Residence. The guards; J,, the lucretia Borgia of housing; the blathering of early family cocooning; the eerie sense of collective madness and the laughable security. They have one of those Mission Impossible drop gates, but only on one side of the two line entrance. I told the guards to call Paramount Studios and see if they don’t have another one in the back lot. They smile; I smile. Nobody knows what the other is saying, much less thinking.

What I was thinking was that any terrorist planning a Belson siege in Ifrane is now going to think long and hard about how to get past that bar. Which is wood, to top it all. I’m thinking they might have send in a suicide bomber just to blow up the gate if it doesn’t open automatically; I think the weight is too much. Meanwhile, those who wish to be viewed and noted by Dr. K. as to when they came in and who with and what about, has to wait for the guard to give up his conversation about his neighbor’s cousin’s mother’s dalliances with the mukodoom and push down on the weight and let in the light.

But here’s the point. We moved out because of Lucy. The people were terrified. Poop everywhere. People were drowning in it. Then a boy lost his cap; a little girl watched in horror as her sandwich disappeared into the blackskape of Lucy’s great white Nazi mouth. But let’s be Berkeley. She needed her freedom. And she was not going to be held back by unlocked windows and guards with nothing gunlike in their white holsters... But now she’s here, the door’s open 24/7. No questions about where she goes, who she sees, what watering holes she wishes to frequent. And so now we’re here and you’d think now, finally, happy. HAAAAAAPPPPPPPY.

But it ain’t so. The bitch is on a streak. For the last four days, something destroyed. A scatter rug, the gear shift nob, two poinsettias. Every day she finds something to stab me with. Why? Well, it’s a new house. And incidentally, at least once she’s gone back to Le Residence, to wait for Catherine, of Tarragon, who left her out to dry every day I was gone. Chained up like the hunchback of Neutered Dames. Which she is not and needs to be. But you wonder why she would go back there. Why would Nelson Mandela want to see that prison again? Well in the bitch’s case one reason she went back is I beat her silly when she tore up the plants. For no good reason. That was personal. She knows what she’s doing. It’s all planned. She’s wired. She has a list.

And by the way, It’ll be a couple hundred dollars in repair costs before we’re finished with the sofas she tore up in our apartment and then Catherine’s. But it’s the pathology of it that I mind. Hers and now mine. Folie a deux, what happened to us? Old white men, left to their own devices come apart.

So I try to fathom it. New house, I understand. You feel a little estranged. But you wanted your freedom, right? From wherever she’d gone. But she’s saying, “So get up off your fat ass and let’s get on a mission you old fart. Here you are, adjusting every last marigold, every rug angle and light shadow, not doing a shred of work, because you can’t sit still for more than 6 minutes and you’re talking to me about having too much energy. Physician, heal thyself. And while you’re at it, take a shower.”