10086 Sunset Boulevard

While I was enjoying my summer, Dan was suffering through his one long minute at a time. No matter how he broached the subject with his house guest of her having to find another place to live, she wasn’t getting it. I think she must have figured he’d eventually tire of trying to get rid of her and they would be together by way of resignation.I received a few emails from Dan, but the phone calls started coming in on a daily basis and then two or three times a day. He’d call from the house when she had fallen asleep at night. I would ask him questions to try and better gauge the situation in our limited communications.

“What does she do when you tell her that she has to leave?” I asked him.

“She sits there and stares at me and after a while she comes up with something that will make things better and the suggestions are always about what I can do for her to make things better”.

After a phone call one evening I received an email from him:

From certain things you have said I feel it necessary to make something perfectly clear to you. I do not wish to continue having a relationship with this woman in any way, shape or form. I have come to detest her and I just want her out of my life.

Well, that certainly cleared things up for me. It’s not difficult for anyone to get on Dan’s shit list. But someone has to work real hard to get him to truly “detest” them. At one time he had thought he may remain friends with her, but her selfishness and total disregard for his health problems had turned him off completely.

One of my favorite pastimes with Dan was “Movie Nights”. We’d get on a roll with a subject or an actor: William Holden, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen. We had movie marathons that would last for several nights. Dan would stop the movie at certain key spots and we’d get into a discussion about what was going on, how the plot had taken a certain turn, how good the writing was at this point or, that special something an actor had that was showcased in a pivotal scene in the movie. It was like Advanced Film Studies. Dan knows his cinema as well as he knows his literature.

These were the times I missed the most, but the squatter wasn’t having any part of that either. This was an email I received from him:

Hello. Watched a great Steve McQueen documentary that she fell asleep on because that meant 90 minutes of attention that she wasn’t getting. This documentary that TCM did on Steve McQueen is great. I have it on DVD. If you see it in the TV listings, watch it, otherwise I’ll send you my copy. I have a few eerie similarities with him. As his first wife - who is interviewed extensively - said, “If he liked you, he simply liked you. But if he didn’t like you, he made sure you knew about it”. She didn’t finish watching it because I shushed her when she started yapping over a section so she got in a snit and went to sleep. It’s like living with a 12-year old.

He called me one night from the balcony off of the bedroom they were sharing. He sounded distraught, at a breaking point. I was not enjoying Dan’s misery, as he had long passed the point of what I thought fair punishment for his crime. Finally I had had enough and suggested an intervention. His illness was so much worse, after years of work to get it to a manageable state, and the ongoing stress of The Mistake Who Wouldn’t Leave was playing havoc with his impaired immune system.

She finally planned a weekend to go north and visit family. She’d planned trips before, but always cancelled them at the last minute. We came up with a plan. I would come down and help him move her things into a nearby hotel. It would be paid for for one night and she would need to figure out where to go from there. If she cancelled the trip, I would stay at the hotel and confront the woman and make plans to help her leave, calling her family if we could not reason with her. But one way or another she had to go.

The night before I left to make the trip Dan called me. She’d booked a rental car and was all set to leave in the morning. I made the long drive down Highway 5, feeling apprehensive about everything and what I was helping Dan to do. I’d made it clear that I was helping him as a friend.

I was still partaking in my cyber relations with Ned at this point and it gave me a nice buffer to keep me from falling back into Dan’s arms and into the bed that he had shared with her.

When I arrived she had gone and I helped Dan move her out. As she had done for me, I packed her stuff up into boxes and into her suitcase. I packed her things with care, took them over to the hotel and set things up as I would want things set up for me. I was treating my karma with the greatest of respect these days, since certain prayers were being answered. One of them was to be able to do exactly what I was doing and that was moving her out of Dan’s home.

He dumped her the same way he dumped me. An ungracious end to an ungracious beginning. He sent her an email. I didn’t protest this, because he had told her for months that she had to move out and she ignored him. She called him a few times after receiving the email and the conversations were brief. Her family asked her to please not move in so quickly with the next man she met on the Internet. Apparently Dan was not her first willing victim.

Dan and I took a drive. We drove through Hollywood, down Sunset Boulevard, through Beverly Hills and headed down to Santa Monica where we strolled the pier. We stopped outside of the restaurant that has now been turned into a Bubba Gumps. It used to be Moby’s Dock. We would go there for dinner when we dated back in 1979 and it was where we were having dinner when Dan proposed to me 1998. Note to interloper: I had a yummy shrimp in my mouth when he proposed to me.

We took a walk on the beach and didn’t say much. We treated each other with respect and the day was ….romantic. We were romancing each other. We went home and fell asleep in the living room watching movies that night.

I stayed another day, just to make sure there was no big drama when she returned to the nearby hotel. There was no big drama, she wasn’t all that surprised but pissed off because she had been using my computer and a lot of her stuff was on there. Funny how she just moved into that house and took over everything, including my computer and then got annoyed about me taking it back. Well, it was nothing that couldn’t be remedied.

I left Dan and drove back “home” where I received a “Dear Jo” email from Ned Flanders (like I really needed another one of those!). He had met a real flesh and blood woman and didn’t feel right continuing our cyber escapades. I resisted the urge to tell him to “piss off already” as Ned had become extremely annoying going between “horny hot blooded male” and “self flagellating churchgoer”. I just wrote a nice little letter back, closing the whole uncomfortable episode. Ned had served me well, helped me keep my guard up, but I was strong enough to do it on my own now.

Then I got an email from Dan:

She’s rented an apartment in the building next door and she’s moving in tomorrow.

Next: The Long Way Home

At this point I just took a nice long break. I was worried about Dan and his situation, but it was Dan’s problem. His actions earlier this year certainly freed me up from any obligation to assist with the crisis. Nope, I was going to stay out of it. I needed to let it go. And I did. It was summer and I fit into a bathing suit. I swam each morning, spent a few days with my friends in the wine country and enjoyed life with the new me. I also had my first cyber sex.I started thinking about sex again and how much I still wanted to engage in that particular activity. I might have been playing dead for the last couple of years with Dan, yet I was far from dead. But I didn’t want to go out and meet anyone new.

And so, in a weak moment I sent an e-mail to Dan’s web based email account:

“I want to have knock down, fall on the floor, bang my head against the wall kind of sex again”.

Nothing.

Nothing for a week and then I received this titillating reply:

“Had an ear infection this past week”.

Hmmm.

Dan still loved me, but maybe he no longer saw me in that light? Well, he had enough problems of his own and since the premenopausal nymphomaniac wasn’t leaving, he would probably resort to banging her once in a while, so he didn’t share my sexual frustration.

Maeve had a friend for me who was feeling lonely too and I was ready to play. It felt safe since she knew him and he was 3000 miles away. My first email to my new playmate was an introduction and he wrote back almost immediately. He was much more at ease with the idea of cyber dating than I was. He introduced himself and then said “and I understand you also dabbled in porn and of course I have to hear all about that”. Huh?

I sent my new friend a reply answering his email and ending it with:

“I’ll tell you more about my foray into porn in the next email”.

I asked Maeve what this was all about and I received a letter apologizing profusely:

“I don’t know what is wrong with him! I never said you were involved in porn. I just told him about the documentary and the pictures you had been taking of yourself, and I never even showed him the pictures. I wouldn’t, not without your permission. He just heard what he wanted to hear!”

I wrote back telling her not to worry about it, that I thought it was kind of funny and to go ahead and send him the pictures he was bugging her for. The pictures were some I had taken after my weight loss, showing off my ample bosom that remained the same size while the rest of me was growing smaller.

“Wow! You are so hot!” was the email I received after he had a gander at the photographs showcasing my DD’s. My ego continued to mend.

I started out my next e-mail with:

I have to clear up the ‘dabbled in porn’ comment - I can’t have you thinking I am out there on film greeting the pizza boy at the door wearing only a smile. I do have porn connections. There certainly are stories to tell about the industry, but I won’t hit you with them right now. I could probably ruin it for you, and if you have a normal, healthy enjoyment of adult films, it wouldn’t be fair. As for my own involvement, I was a research assistant on “Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes.” One of the tasks was to sit for hours in a vault full of Swedish Erotica slides, going through all of them to find pictures of John Holmes with his clothes on. Needle in a haystack. Life gets very strange at times.

He apologized for letting his imagination run wild and for a while we enjoyed being there for each other. We came from very different worlds. My world seemed exotic to him, and to me his world so wonderfully different than my Hollywood world full of self serving assholes (I say that fondly to all of my self serving asshole friends who read my website).

He is a farmer and his work is very physical. He had strong arms and healthy desires. I wanted to have sex with him as much as he wanted to have sex with me. Suddenly the 3000 mile safety net became a big frustration.

But something started to bother me about him, something I couldn’t quite place and something I was willing to overlook because I was enjoying having a “boyfriend”. I was going through all the same emotions via cyberspace that I have experienced in “real life”. Yes, I was willing to bend for this man and the buffer he provided for me in regards to my feelings for Dan. I would need that buffer for my next visit to Dan, but more on that in the next story.

One day I was talking to Maeve on the telephone and telling her about my feelings for “our” friend, and there was a side of him I was feeling a little confused about.

She said, hesitantly “Well, I do call him Ned Flanders, but don’t tell him I told you that because it really ticks him off”.

“Ned Flanders?”

“Yes, you know on ‘The Simpsons’? Homer’s next door neighbor”.

That was it! The something that was bothering me. The good Samaritan, the church goer, volunteering at a soup kitchen, the bible quoting, the bushy mustache, the pink shirt. I was having cyber sex with Ned Flanders!

This led to a conversation about the virtues of Ned Flanders. Maybe I was just afraid of a nice guy, so I continued to try and have a relationship with Ned. The initial sexual energy slipped away and eventually the whole thing fizzled out, leaving me rather embarrassed and oh so grateful that we didn’t actually exchange bodily fluids.

The thing is I don’t think he ever recovered from the disappointment of my not being a porn star and I’ll never look at Ned Flanders the same way again.

Next: Extreme Breakup

Our newly-acquired friends from The Bat Segundo Show, a literary podcast featuring interviews with today’s contemporary writers, dropped us a line last night announcing that their podcast interview with author Jennifer Weiner is now up and running.

To subscribe to the show with a podcatcher program (for later transfer to your iPod), copy and paste this URL into your program. If you do not have an iPod to listen the show, go to the main Segundo site (linked above) and you can save the MP3 to your computer by clicking on the bat picture.

Among the subjects discussed in the 51 minute interview:

Mysteries, Susan Isaacs, Zoe Heller, the specific details of murder, inexplicable shame and guilt among the Marina crowd, diapers vs. cloth, whether Matt Lauer should be peed on, the inversion of tough-guy dialogue, first-person voice, observational novels, chicklit, dismissive husbands, the ?Free to Be You and Me? generation, feminism, the Young, Roving Correspondent (and other men) perplexed by pink covers, attracting male audiences to chicklit, perspective, the New York Times, Margaret Atwood, Uglydolls, Ann Coulter, Caitlin Flanagan, nannies and motherhood, plotting, Stephen King, the ideal motorized vehicle to be run over by, hands shaking, wedgies, pink book covers, Anne Rice, editorial battles over human moments, Jonathan Franzen, penises, the In Her Shoes film adaptation, Toni Collette, the inexplicable science of film advertising, on writing books that offer consistent messages of happiness, responding to criticism about the People hot tub photo shoot, the next book, closeness to narrative voices, Tony Danza, the dense talk show bookers, Book TV, Jezebel Bright and the influence of manga.

That infamous People magazine shoot resulted in a controversial posting at NumberOneHitSong.com called Eight Reasons Why Chick Lit Authors Should Be Kicked Until They’re Dead.

As 10086 Sunset Boulevard slowly finds its audience, it’s amusing to read some of the Google search strings that bring people to this cyber doorstep. Here are a few from this morning:

Women who forgot to wear panties
Anne Archer panties
Replace husband underwear panties
Are the good hookers in Sunset Boulevard
What is meant by Sunset
Cleavage showing clothing

Anne Archer panties?

I took the coastal route back to Northern California, feeling all the while that I was driving in the wrong direction and further away from Dan by the moment. I still didn’t know where I was with all of this, but I did know it was a hell of a lot better than where I had been and I was thankful for the respite from hell. In a selfish moment, I felt quite glad that she was still there. It gave me time to put my thoughts together, before Dan was suddenly single again. I knew I had time, because he wouldn’t throw her out on the street. Why? Dan wouldn’t have someone go homeless or hungry, and reluctantly I had to agree with him.

It was also to be the start of some very strange emails and phone calls from Dan. He started using excuses to get out of the house by himself, so that he could call me, but these were brief phone calls, because he didn’t want to arouse any suspicions. Well, of course she would be suspicious, if he could do this to me, she would be easy. That had to have occurred to her. She couldn’t be blamed for her suspicions.

“I feel like I am sneaking out from my parents house to call my girlfriend” he said to me during one of the phone calls, sounding almost boyish.

“Dan” I said, trying to keep my voice even in tone, “I don’t like the idea that there is more deception going on here, even if it is towards her. Why can’t you just tell her the truth?”.

“Because” he said “her mental stability worries me and I don’t know what she might do”. This little tidbit made my stomach turn. I had joked about the Fatal Attraction scenario, but the idea that he had got this involved with someone he knew nothing about and she may be that off kilter was not a pleasant thought. Not to mention the fact that there’s no sport in making fun of the mentally impaired and my hatred started looking a lot like pity. By her own admission in the writers forum, she’d been bonked (on the head as well) a little too often and was easily confused. I couldn’t top that.

I knew it would be a while before Dan would be able to find a way to be free of the interloper, but I was thinking a couple of weeks not another three months. It would be three months, and some very frantic late night phone calls from Dan, before I finally said “Enough is enough, she has to go” and actually did something about it.

Next: Cyber Sex with Ned Flanders

Okay, folks, here is the day that everything changed.  As Dan walked toward me, I was instantly aware that things were much different than I had thought they might be. I had no idea how I would react but my arms went up and around him without a thought. A hug was not what I had planned on doing, but that’s what happened. I sensed the same pain in him, that I had been suffering with for the past three months.

He spilled the beans to me - some of it I already knew - but the timing didn’t seem right to confess that I had been cyber stalking him for three months in order to try and piece things together. He told me the whole story and was brutally honest about all of it, including his miserable role in inviting her into our lives. Somehow he had managed to break both of our hearts with this act of betrayal. Nice going, Dan.

I wanted to shout “What the hell were you thinking?” but I knew it wasn’t so much a mid life crisis that was the trigger — it was more like an episode of sheer insanity. Full blown, all out delusional insanity, the kind that comes upon you when you have felt trapped for too long and you’ll take any escape route that comes your way. Trouble was, when the insanity went away, she didn’t.

She was a only a couple of years my junior and equipped with her own problems, her own baggage and suddenly here she was 24/7 with an agenda that sure didn’t include bettering his life. She was in this for herself, the opportunity to live with a writer and be mentored. He hadn’t dumped me for a younger woman, just a very emotionally immature one.

She was exactly the kind of woman that would drive Dan up the wall. Yes, further than I had driven him. Her writing was the kind of stuff he normally would have made fun of in the writer’s forum. Dan’s punishment for what he had done was not going to come from my hands, it had already been delivered. I couldn’t have thought up anything worse.

And she wasn’t leaving. What self respecting woman moves in with the guy she’s cheating with and then refuses to go when he wakes up one morning and goes “Oops, I made a big mistake?”. Well, we know the answer to that one, don’t we?

She would be back soon. She had gone out while I was picking up my things because she didn’t want to be there when I arrived. Not out of any decency in allowing Dan and me to have some time alone together, she just didn’t like confrontation. Neither do I, but come on, this one was owed to me!

If you really don’t want confrontation, I doubt if you move into someone else’s home while they are away. The one thing I would do differently would happen right here at this point in the story. I would have sat myself down, taken a deep breath and said “I’m not leaving until the bitch gets back”.

Dan’s confession that I was still the love of his life, always was and always would be was what I wanted to hear more than anything else.  Or at least what my bruised ego wanted to hear. It caught me off guard and defused the last bit of “anger energy” that had been holding me together. The last three months hit me like a truck delivering that ton of bricks and I felt shaky and sick - I needed to get out of there quickly, before the “strong, powerful, beautiful” facade disappeared.

I knew that the interloper was not the cause of our problems, but she also was not the cure. She had at least made Dan and me see very clearly the problems we couldn’t face and how much we still loved each other, so she had been of some service, besides a temporary cure for Dan’s blue ball problem. Note to Dan: Hookers don’t want to stick around afterwards and if you propose marriage when you’ve got your dick in their mouth, they know what part of you is talking. No she may not have been the cause of our problems, but one fact remained. She had to go.

Before I left Dan after I had packed up my stuff, I turned to him and it felt good to say it out loud: “She has to go”.

Next: She Has to Go (cont.)

I did not want to make this trip. I could feel my heels digging in and anger and resentment building at the fact that I had waited so long to do what I should have done while I was still in shock over the whole matter. It would have been perfect then, before reality sunk in. I could have even dealt with meeting her, knowing that my British upbringing would have kicked in and I would have been both civilized and cordial.Oh well, here was reality: It was three months down the line, and I had to face the facts. The fact was that I was returning to my former home to pick up my belongings and say goodbye to the man I still loved in spite of this hideous indiscretion, this betrayal, this… well, you know all that.

My emotions ranged from the very deep to the extremely shallow. One moment the pain of the heartache would take my breath away. The next minute I was picking out my wardrobe. Tight clothes to show off the fact there was 34 pounds less of me. The black Italian jeans would show off my butt nicely, a top with the V-neck, not too much cleavage showing, just enough. I had my hair cut and highlighted. Should I wear his favorite perfume? I hadn’t worn that for him in a couple of years, it would be too obvious. I didn’t want to scream “Eat your heart out, you bastard!” I just wanted to announce it. I wanted him to see just how much better I was doing without him. If I could just hide my broken heart. It never occurred to me that he would be the one who could not hide his.

The e-mails between Dan and I had been so strange and I didn’t know what to expect when I got down there. There seemed to be no remorse on his part. It was as if he had lost his soul. But once again, I was assuming he had actually composed those e-mails himself.

I so desperately needed to know that he was remorseful - even if he had found love with this woman. I at least deserved a huge apology. And didn’t he want my forgiveness? I also knew I may have to let that go, it might not ever happen and I had to get on with my life, whatever that was going to be now.

The night before the trip I expressed my feelings to Maeve in our usual email exchange. Her last words of advice before I made the four hundred mile trip were “I wanted to wish you luck. Be STRONG, be POWERFUL, be BEAUTIFUL”. That was to be my mantra through the next stressful day.

I have made the drive down Interstate 5 many times over the years under many circumstances. Some joyful, some tragic and some just out of necessity. Whenever I would try to leave it, Los Angeles always called me back. My first trip there was 26 years ago and resulted in my first fateful meeting with Dan.

Now here I was making the drive again under circumstances I would not want to have imagined. I had to focus on the fact that I would be ending this chapter in my life and that picking up my belongings would allow me to finally be out and start life anew. At least that is what I was busy telling myself.

The drive seemed endless until I got to the Grapevine. Usually my favorite part of the whole drive, I was now filled with anxiety and sadness. I reached the peak and was rewarded with that beautiful view of Los Angeles and the surrounding mountains. The view usually warmed my heart, because it meant I was returning to Dan and was almost home, which now flooded me with a new wave of grief and nostalgia.

I checked into the hotel I would be spending the night at and called Dan to firm up the plans for me picking up my stuff. He sounded very distant and when I told him I was ready to come over that evening, he told me he would have to check his new “friend’s” schedule and that he would call me back in half an hour. After I put the phone down, I got livid, pissed off as all hell at the idea of having waited three months, driving 400+ miles and being told that my arrival depended upon her schedule. It’s a good thing I stayed calm while I was talking to him, or I would have never found out the truth. He called me back and I told him that I was coming over now, ready or not so “see you soon”.

I made the 20 minute drive over to the house shaking with anger, saying to myself “be strong, be beautiful, be powerful”.

He was waiting outside as I pulled up to the house and he looked so much better than when I last saw him and so much like Dan, my Dan. I didn’t expect that - I expected him to look like the monster who had caused me such pain. I got out of the car and he walked toward me, looking unsure of the reception he would be getting from me.

Next: She Has To Go

Imagine, if you will, Michael Douglas’s character in the movie “Fatal Attraction” (aptly named Dan) inviting Alex Forrester to come and live with him in his home and phoning wife Beth (Anne Archer) to tell her he’d prefer she didn’t come home. It would have been a different movie and you would have been happy to have seen both of the cheating characters go down in a blaze into the hell they created for each other. Well, initially that is how I felt. Dan and the interloper could rot in hell. Shame on them both. They deserved each other and everything they were going to find out about each other.I was the injured party, I was the one who had been so unfairly wronged. I wallowed in my self righteousness for only a very short time.

“Find yourself a sugar mama”.

Those words echoed back at me, snapping me out of my martyrdom.

After my father passed away, I promised Dan I would not be gone as frequently and would at last be present to contribute to putting our lives together in Los Angeles. But a year after my father passed away, I was still making the trek back to Northern California to tend to family matters.

“Please don’t stay longer than two weeks this time” Dan pleaded with me.

I promised him I wouldn’t. Five weeks later I was still at my family’s home.

Shortly before he did “the deed”, he called me and was trying to tell me something. He was at his breaking point, trying to tell me what he was going through with his illness, the pressures of work or lack of work, which ever it was at the time, and to tell me that he felt he was going through a crisis. A mid life crisis. I rolled my eyes to the ceiling and shook my head. I couldn’t take one more thing and, after years of dealing with my father’s illness and Dan’s illness, I was having my very own meltdown.

“Find yourself a sugar mama”.

Yes, I said it to him and I wasn’t really joking but never really dreaming that he actually would. So how righteous could I possibly be?

I choked on that later. Later, when I wanted to be angry - I needed to be angry - but I had already taken that right away from myself. It was awful to be experiencing outrage at the way I had been treated, and such remorse for the way I had treated Dan. I was going to implode on the conflicting emotions. I already knew Dan had made a mistake with his new “friend” from what I was gathering from my cyber spying sessions, but of course I couldn’t be the one to tell him. Later I would learn he quickly came to that conclusion too, but he would have to suffer for months yet with the choice he had made. I didn’t know that yet. I was still suffering jealousy and anguish and betrayal. Oh, and I still had to make that damn trip back “home” where they were living together, to pick up my belongings. How in the hell would I be able to keep myself under control when I saw him. What if she was there and I accidentally beat the crap out of her? I so wanted this nightmare to be over with.

Next: The Trip

It was hard for me to sort through my e-mails to share this with you, as I had to relive some damned unpleasant feelings. A wound like that goes deep. Here is the actual letter Dan sent to me in March. As you know Dan dumped me and informed me someone was sleeping in my bed via an e-mail, a “Dear Jo” letter if you will, without the Dear Jo. Here is the unedited version of his e-mail.Hi,

Yes, I am okay and I have been busy but not just with the article. I
don’t know how to say this, that is why I am writing. I have met
someone else that I have decided I want to spend a lot of time with. Who she is and where I met her is unimportant — I’m not going to hide this information from you, should you want to know, but it was very dramatic and life-altering and made me realize with great lament that for the last two years you and I have been spinning in concentric circles that have not been beneficial to either one of us in terms of our mental health or personal growth.

I’m sorry if this is painful to you and I didn’t enter into this with
the intent of hurting you in any way whatsoever. Life throws us some strange curves sometimes and whether we step to the plate to swing at the ball or decide to sit it out measures our destiny in a lot of ways. I chose to swing at the ball and I hope and believe that it was the right thing to do.

She is not living with me right now but I would prefer that you not
return on March first. I can arrange at some point to have anything you need from here shipped to you.

Dan

You already know how I felt when I was delivered this news, but something else besides the obvious, bothered me about this e-mail. It just wasn’t Dan, nothing about it reflected the person I knew Dan to be, nor did the few e-mails we exchanged later. It would be quite a while before I would realize why. He wasn’t writing the e-mails.

Yes, he’d taken up with a real piece of work. Concentric circles was a description better suited to the inner workings of the interloper’s head. She was an “Alex”, the bunny boiler from Fatal Attraction, and Dan was the bunny she was boiling. Things were really going to heat up for him, but not in the way he may have dreamed they would.

Next: Heading for a Showdown