Kissing and Telling

Statistically there are children in the five boroughs who are regularly abused-- beaten, chained like dogs and deprived of necessities. There are women who are daily beaten-- men, too.  There are handicapped people who are mistreated and neglected... unable to cry out or ask for help.  There is also kindness and those who give of their limited and precious life hours to ensure the comfort of others. Saints and angels.

Politically incorrect as it may be, I confess I am a little baffled at the press war on our governor.  Women of my generation are less horrified by the accusations because we spent much of our careers, up until deep middle age, sidestepping and leapfrogging such innuendoes and advances.  We squirmed out of arms, turned our cheeks and kept vigilant and sober at professional parties.  One night I was out with some major music business executive and assumed my boyfriend was giving me some under-table affection until he got up to use the men's room and the hand remained.  Shocked?  I could not disclose because telling the tale had its own sorry repercussions.

The woman who spoke up last night-- not to belittle her trauma-- had to read her account.  These are carefully prepared-- clinical and not exaggerated, but honestly-- I could not really understand what the complaint was all about.  There were plenty of witnesses-- including her son-- she looked charmed and flattered, not really horrified or traumatized.  Virtually everyone kisses me twice, like it or not.  I met the governor once at a reception... it was maybe 30 years ago, he was newly married and extremely friendly and sort of avuncular although I am a bit older.  I thought nothing except the politically ambitious often greet one with an air of forced familiarity and affection.  Bill Clinton had a similar habit, lol.  It's like they want you to remember their held-over handshake or embrace; it affects your sense that they care about you-- not YOU, but us. Cuomo is a little clueless and old-school.  But don't we have larger fish to fry?  Like Donald Barracuda Trump?  Do we need a scandal distracting the more important business of our Attorney General at this moment when the pandemic is still raging and our democracy is under attack?  Not really.  

My older sister used to think everyone was ogling her.  She actually got a teacher suspended and fired for antics calculated to distract him.  Of course he was crucified for weakness; she was annoyed that he'd discouraged her.  Maybe my familial shame has prejudiced me... but I was forced by my sister to testify on her behalf when I'd spent nights in the back seat of an old Firebird while she and a married young Phys. Ed teacher touched each other in his backyard toolshed. Teenagers.

Meanwhile there are truly horrendous acts of war being perpetrated-- racial profiling, violent acts of hatred and aggression... suffering people.  There are the horrific Epsteens and Weinsteins who seem to have got away with abusing women for years.  The Governor stood up to our former president and protected New York during a health crisis.  I miraculously received the assistance I needed just to survive. Why is it that I feel this campaign has an underlying motive?  I apologize to any women who have been genuinely hurt.  I just find the timing 'off' and I am fairly certain the good he can do will outweigh any behavioral mistakes going forward.  He has maybe sinned and transgressed and confessed and been duly hand and face-slapped.  He has not tried to discredit his victims, like our ex-President. He has apologized.  

The women of my generation broke ground in many sectors.  We are still under-acknowledged, underpaid... but we did not have the freedom to dress as we chose in the workplace-- even onstage without risking extra attention from our male colleagues who crossed lines freely and knew we would not tell.  Most of us did not kiss either; to be judged by equal standards, my first all-girls band refused to bare our legs and glam-out for management.  We wanted to play.  

I've written before about the music producer who  propositioned and then beat me when I would not respond.  It changed my life forever. Besides some karmic baggage, he seems to have enjoyed his life.  I moved on-- abandoned a solo career-- did not have the stomach to weather these episodes, and at the time predatory behaviors were difficult to report and prosecute.  My career as it was would be scarred.  Now that I'm old I can tell the tale and it is far from Governor Cuomo's style of border-crossing.  Not that any of it is okay... but there is a learning curve-- there are resources, and there is also a door.  The smarter among us recognize a 'bad' boss... we have options.  In all cases, dignity must champion ambition.  

Scrabble

This morning I came across a quote from Cervantes: 'All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will improve... for it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever and... since the bad has lasted so long the good is close at hand.'  Well... it touched me-- like a mother's hand on my face, until I realized-- these are the words of a deluded madman, are they not? I thought of Job-- then a friend lying in a hospital on a ventilator, witnessing or not witnessing the disintegration of his own brain. 

'We have all been here before' the song from 1970 was running over and over in my mind's ear like a damaged vinyl skip as I woke... and wondered, as I often do these days, if I am losing my mind or simply misplacing pieces of it.  While identifying the music in my head (often it is my own invention which takes form in a dream) from the Deja Vu album,  it occurred that we have not been here before... at least not I... and I am not sure when the good will come as I watch another friend suffer from the relentless tide of late-stage cancer and there are no highlighted days on her calendar-- not celebrations or moments of relief without drugs.  

My own mother warned me-- Pick something beautiful, she used to say... but I continued to opt for the dark and difficult.   She read to us from Bambi... my first souvenir was the word 'thicket'.. I was enchanted by the aura of words which led me into hidden passages and opened doors that seemed a little forbidden.  These days-- entering older age at an intersection of quarantine and cultural procrastination... well, it is an unforgiving sort of wilderness-- a bad mirage.  It is like stepping out and not knowing where the deep sidewalk crevasses may lie... there are no maps for this.  

And still, watching the news, accosted daily with the barrage of online activities and people--even friends-- competing for time on social media... it is as though things have not stopped accelerating. My peers are both bewildered and a little terrified... we have been simultaneously halted in our tracks and left behind.  No wonder Bruce Springsteen had a DUI.  It's not easy navigating reality and the dark gravity of what is still in our head.  He was writing a song of himself... ? Personally I have no license, no car... but I was 'there'...

Some of us have begun memoirs and autobiographies.  Some have begun to shed memories... or to find, as I often do, this 'soup' of sentimentality and nostalgia simmering on a hot stove of unfamiliar ingredients.  Compounded by the challenge of losing our taste and smell... has anyone else spent nightmarish hours wondering at the metaphorical resonance of this virus symptom?  As though we are intentionally misplaced... what if we were bloodhounds, any animals who became entirely useless and disoriented and could not find our way home?

We are at this threshold, many of us... I see even celebrities losing their minds, making bad choices-- a bit of Quixotic paranoia, a bit of desperation to be relevant-- inventing drama, putting it up on a screen for others to judge, to approve... to be watched or seen because we can't seem to find our own Deja-Vu here.   Our own mental illness has become sort of an entertainment raison d'être... it makes news, it reaches others... Personally I feel like a reverse ventriloquist-- like I must speak for those who cannot-- the ones lying in hospital beds-- the forgotten neighbors who fear leaving their apartments... and the ones who are no longer here.  They haunt my dreams.  

We are all future ghosts and corpses.  I'm sorry, Mom... it's a terrible thought but it is a life force.  I leave virtual daffodils at your sad grave every day; I have failed you simply by fulfilling my own program.  Like Bruce, maybe-- and I was uncharitable to him-- I am driven but not driving, thank goodness.  Last night I saw Demi Lovato and the Duchess or whatever she is also prostrating themselves... Yes, they are given a platform and it behooves them to take it for themselves, however dramatically they insist the opposite.  Our Governor-- can they not find someone else to crucify?  These people are maybe discarded too quickly.  You voted for them and they are human and on a platform and made mistakes.  I remember how quickly they took down Eliot Spitzer when he was trying to dismantle the frauds of Wall Street.  Where is our perspective? Heroes are all flawed... scrutiny cannot fail to reveal them.  

Yes, we women have all suffered injustices and disrespect; at this moment of my life I occasionally peruse the scrapbook of my girlhood and the incidents were plentiful and appalling.  I was busy trying to become the voice for something I have surely failed.  Rather than identify as a whiner I opted for the larger picture.   Two of my friends, coincidentally, have just begun-- out of boredom or disappointment-- jigsaw puzzles.  Comforting to know there is a solution; it will work.  The rest of the world seems to be fragmenting.  Perhaps I the aging chicken have become my own fallen egg.  All the Kings Horses, etc...