The Giant

I wasn’t very nice to J. I look back on how I treated him, the bluntness with which I dealt with his emotions, the devil-may-care attitude I took towards the future, and I’m stunned at my own callousness. At the time I said to myself, “Look, I’m just being honest with him” and I was. I was more honest with J. than I probably was with anybody else in my life up until that time. He was a stranger to me, someone completely new, and I was in the process of re-inventing myself and he was the first to “benefit” from the new me. Or be bludgeoned.

Later, once I became used to this new person, the person who had shuffled off the shackles of my Holly Hobbie dress-wearing past, I didn’t need to bludgeon people over the head with my persona. But J. got there first. I could have gone backwards … it would be so easy to go backwards … that old self was right there, I could still feel her in me, I could still revert to her when I feel threatened … but oh, this new self has arisen, she is powerful, she is free, she doesn’t have to be the way she used to be, she doesn’t have to accept that old destiny.

I had no idea who I was, but I knew the old me was dead. Any infringement on my new self, any limits put on her, I fought like a tiger. Or, worse, I would vanish without a word. A master of the “ghosting” technique. I was not graceful yet. I was still learning. I was like a giant trying to walk around on a human-size chessboard. There was much inadvertent bludgeoning. And so I bludgeoned J. with honesty. And he took it. Maybe I didn’t respect him for that. I wouldn’t put it past the Me I was then.

For a while, for 2 or 3 months during that manic spring, we had an awesome understanding. I had just moved to Chicago, fleeing a relationship gone bad, and a crack-up in Woodland Hills that left me chastened and frightened about my ability to actually get along in this world. My old boyfriend, my first love, had moved on already. He was dating someone else. The fact of this seared through me, singe-ing me to the bone. And yet that old boyfriend was still calling me, randomly, from pay phones, late at night, choked with tears about our breakup.

I was in a new city, a city I had only spent 24 hours in prior to moving there, and everything was shimmering, dangerous, the air full of beautiful sharp knives. Pores opening up, fearlessness rising. I still had terrible moments, lonely moments, in my first apartment, the only apartment I had ever had by myself. A quiet dark room, with a ratty grey carpet, the hallways reeking of the sweet poison of roach motels. The elevator was rickety and would stall between floors. It had a creaking metal gate that you had to yank open to disembark. I put on my Salvation Army bought “corporate” outfit, and took the L downtown to my temp assignments, staring out the window, my eyes dilated, my breath high in my chest. I had been living with fear for a couple of years. Tamping down the reality of Sheila in order to fit into my relationship. Carol Shields talks about “inner weather”. I had been in open battle to calm down my inner weather for years, thinking that there was something wrong with me, something was terribly terribly wrong.

Turns out there was something wrong. But it wasn’t with the ups and downs of my inner weather. It was the suppression that was wrong. It took me years to come to terms with it, and on some level, it is an issue with which I still struggle.

I rode the L, wearing my little flats, my hose, my hair pinned down to one side, staring out at the roofs of the brownstones, the lights of Wrigley Field, the brand-new silhouette of the Chicago skyline against the dusk, and think: This is me. This. Is. Me. I had never had my life look the way I wanted it to look. Not since I was, oh, 5 or 6, maybe. But now, I got to choose.

It’s not that everything suddenly was hunky-dory and all my dreams had come true. It was that now, it all was up to me and to me alone. I was single as an adult for the first time ever, and I met every challenge that came my way. I could do this. I could sign up with a temp agency. I could kick ass on the typing test. I could start auditioning, getting parts, rehearsing. I could look for an apartment, find an apartment, put down money for it, get a cat, get my cat his shots, and set up a litter box. These are small things, but at that point they were tremendous triumphs. There was a secondhand store where I bought a mattress. I put it on the floor. I had no other furniture for months. It didn’t feel right to have possessions. The new me needed to be untethered. All of my books were shipped to me from LA and I threw them all out. Can you believe that? That gives you some idea. I threw out my entire book collection.

Eventually I got a little two-seater couch, a hand-me-down from a friend, but for the year that I lived there, that was it, in terms of furniture. I didn’t even put blinds up. My windows remained bare, and open to the alley and building beyond. The details of life, the surface stuff, which had consumed me when I was with my boyfriend no longer seemed relevant or interesting. It had been a highly domestic relationship, where we cared about futon covers and teflon and shower curtains and getting our pitcutres framed. All that vanished overnight. Never, really, to return, truth be told. I enjoy having nice bookshelves. I love the curtains my mom made for me. I am happy I have a nice bed. But objects don’t matter to me. The feeling that pots and pans are important … is not in my DNA. I don’t judge others who value and love those things, but I felt shame about my indifference for years. I felt like I, as a woman, was supposed to somehow … give a crap. It’s harder for some people to be their true selves. It was hard for me.

I have a Polaroid of myself from a fund raiser I went to very early on in Chicago, maybe 2 months after I had arrived. I had been cast in a show and the theatre company held a fund raiser. I was making new friends. I hadn’t made a new friend in years, my relationship had been very insular, we had been each other’s everything. Most of the new friends I made were men. Kenny, Paul, Michael. At the time the photo was taken, I was skinnier than I had ever been. This was not because, oh, I was dieting and taking care of myself, although I had started running every day, to work off excess energy, and the weight fell off me. The skinniness was mainly a direct result of the horrible breakup, of being so poor that I lived on Lipton’s cup-a-soup, and the adrenaline rush of having to survive. [Update from 2014: I was undiagnosed bipolar. I was in a full-blown manic state for months. Let’s continue.] In the photo, I stand in the middle of an open space in that old Polaroid, wearing all black, my hair is curly and red, I am pale, and I am smiling, my mouth open, holding a plastic cup of wine. A mere two months before I had been sitting in my room in Woodland Hills, California, wearing an old jumper I had made (what was I DOING), a lavendar Holly Hobbie jumper, billowing, shapeless, tennis sneakers, and a T-shirt, watching M*A*S*H re-runs, and drinking Rolling Rocks. The transformation to that skinny girl in black was that radical, that fast.

In retrospect, I suppose if I could, I would say to that girl in the photo: “Sheila, you have no business getting involved with anyone right now. You need to be by yourself for a while.” While I was so anti-relationship it was practically a Sid Vicious sneer, I wanted male attention. I had never been noticed before, not really. For the first time in my life, men thought I was sexy.

I have girlfriends who have never been single, and who cannot be alone. They need a boyfriend. “Having a boyfriend” is, and always has been, a part of their adult lexicon. This was not me, although I was not believed at first when I would share this with the new men (we’ll get back to J. in a minute). Men would roll their eyes at my declaration of independence, and say, “Yeah, right. I’ve heard this one before.” I don’t blame the guys for having this response, by the way. They were responding to the stereotype – the stereotype that exists because oftentimes it is real. Only in this specific case, it was not real. I actually meant what I said. It wasn’t until I met M. a couple of months later – so fast! (aka the beloved “Window Boy”) that I found a man who took me at my word and accepted it. That relationship, in various forms, lasted 11 years. How is that possible? We were kindred spirits in chaos. We had our own way of communicating and we always understood each other. We could relax together. I was addicted to him physically, I loved him, honestly, but all of that was okay. It was two-sided, totally equal. My relationship with M. was the most stable relationship I have ever had.

My first month in Chicago was chaotic. I crashed on my friend Jackie’s couch. The sky was white and wintry. The dome from the church a block away stark and black against the billowing blizzardy sky. I had a suitcase of clothes. I missed my boyfriend so much that I would lie at night, on Jackie’s couch, clutching myself, pressing my hand down over the spot on my chest where my heart was, trying to soothe it, trying to press it back inside. Jackie and I got bronchitis together, with the swiftness of a stampede. We lay on her couch together, watching Life Goes On, feverish, our throats burning (“there is a tiki torch in my throat” Jackie said 10 times a day), and occasionally I would start to weep. I remember one disastrous bronchitis-ridden afternoon when we were flipping through the channels, saw that The Way We Were was on, and thought, foolishly, “Oh, we love this movie! Let’s watch!” By the end, we were both wrecks, but my wreckage took over the afternoon. Jackie was crying about the movie, I was crying about the movie, and then I started crying about my whole life, and then I could not stop. Jackie, even with her interior tiki torch brigade, took care of me. I lay face down on her couch, holding onto a blanket with fists. By this point, the skinny Sheila had already started to emerge from my fat, my old pajamas suddenly hanging off me, I swam in them. And that afternoon, I happened to have a blue bandana wrapped around my head. Jackie got Kleenex, the white sky shot away from us out her window, and Jackie had a couple of moments when she looked at me, skinny and pale with the bandana around my head, and thought, “Wow. Sheila looks like a chemo victim right now.” We laughed about it later. “Member that day I was a chemo victim on your couch?”

But once I got my own apartment, and got my cat Sammy, I started settling in. I was unhinged, unattached. I was in a strange freefall. Every day I woke up thinking; Anything can happen today. During the bronchitis phase, Jackie and I were invited to be part of a new actor’s collective, called The Actor’s Gym. We had to go meet the two organizers of it up in an apartment in Rogers Park. The tiki torches had begun their approach, so we were ill, but we kept our appointment. We coughed our way through the interview, talking about what we were looking for as actors, telling our interviewers what type of work we had done. “I worked at The Walnut Street … hack cough hack … which was great for me … cough … I just moved here … cough cough … so I’m looking to immerse myself … hack hack hack tiki tiki …” The beautiful thing, in memory, about that surreal hacking afternoon in Rogers Park, in an apartment that was being painted so every piece of furniture was covered with a drop cloth, adding to the unreal atmosphere, is that one of the men interviewing me was Ted, a man who would become a dear friend, and who remains a dear friend to this day. This was my first moment meeting him. He remembers that first encounter. “You guys were so sick. We just fell in love with both of you.” They invited us to join the Actor’s Gym. Doing battle with the tiki torches made it difficult to be 100% psyched about anything, but I did have the presence of mind to be happy, proud, and gratified. I had been in Chicago 2 weeks when I joined the Actor’s Gym.

Every Saturday a group of actors would meet in a drafty warehouse space, above a red-velvet-rope nightclub called the China Club on the outskirts of downtown Chicago. The windows were as tall as the walls of my apartment, and the wintry wind shrieked through the cracks into our class. Through the windows, you could see the Sears Tower. I would lie on the buckled hard-wood floor, doing the breathing exercises, doing the group sensory exercises that were part of the Gym, and occasionally I would open my eyes, stare out the window to see the blinking red lights of the Sears Tower antennae against the black night sky, and feel something akin to contentment. It had been years, so I wasn’t sure if that would be an accurate word for that emotion. Did “contentment” feel so exciting? So full of possibility? That’s how I felt in that warehouse space with the bare lightbulbs, the scratched tables, the random furniture lying on the outskirts, a bedframe, an old fridge with the door off, battered chairs, desks, the leftovers of some defunct bureaucracy.

And that was where I met J.

Having guys hit on me was new for me. J. wasn’t the first guy to show interest in me. I said this to him later, in my bludgeoning honesty. J. said, “What if Donald had made a move first?” “I would have gone out with Donald.” Naturally this made J. insecure but I saw no reason to lie. I wasn’t “in a relationship” with J., as far as I was concerned. No need to save his feelings, that would be silly. “So … what … you like Donald?” “I have no idea.” “But you just said you would have gone out with him.” “If he asked me, sure. Why wouldn’t I?” “How about Paul?” “What’s wrong with Paul?” “Nothing.” “I totally would go out with Paul if he asked.” “So … are you saying … that you are only going out with me because I asked first?” “Well, I mean. Yeah.”

I was so selfish at that point I saw no problem, none, with telling the truth. I did NOT LIE. I did NOT PLAY GAMES. I was literal and brutal. My first relationship was made up of gentle lies and me compromising who I was to get along. Big compromises. No more.

Chicago is a smaller town than New York, and all of the actors know each other. I was the new girl.

A couple of words about who J. was. He was a very good actor and had been in a large hit the season before, where he got a lot of press, so he had a confidence about him. There were other guys in the Gym who might have been more good-looking or sexy. Actors are weird people in that there are usually a ton of freakily good-looking sexy people at every turn. J. had beautiful piercing blue eyes, he was pale, and he had an intense face, with an ear to ear grin. He dressed down, to the point of slobbiness, he was not a dandy. He was kind of a schlump, to tell you the truth. (I like schlumps.) He wasn’t 30 yet, but his hairline was receding. And yet charm? Boy had it in spades. If he could bottle what he had, men round the world would score on a more regular basis. He had a kick-ass personality, a snarky sense of humor, and a beautiful way with women. I would dare any woman to try to resist him. He knew how to draw women out, he knew how to ask leading questions, he appeared to listen, he would make funny comments, he forgot nothing, and he seemed to truly enjoy the company of women. Women respond to that.

I was not “looking” for a man. I was not “on the market”. I wasn’t even like, “Maybe I’ll be ready to be on the market by the fall.” The marketplace was 10 oases away, as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t planning on living like a nun, oh no. I was planning on having lots of sex. I felt pretty for the first time in years, I loved the buzzing male attention. I had been “off the market” for 4 years, and my YOUNG years – 20 to 24. FUCK THAT. My ex-boyfriend had been my first (and only) boyfriend, so I had zero experience outside of him and was ready to go wild. Time to have some fun. But not boyfriend fun. No. Don’t get involved, because you know what “being involved” means. “Being involved” means futon covers and Holly Hobbie. The choices were that stark to me. It’s funny: the stereotype is that men want to be hound-dogs and women are ready to settle down, and have to try to corral their man-boys into domesticity. Nah. To me, “boyfriend” meant “domesticity” and that word has had unfavorable connotations to me ever since. Do not fence me in. I was in a growth spurt when I met J. Growth spurts are not comfortable. You do not gradually go from child to adolescent. From adolescent to adult. There are pains. People get hurt along the way. I don’t mean to excuse my behavior, because much of what I did to J. was appalling. But I was suddenly, for the first time in my life, in the realm of figuring out my own truth, how I wanted to be.

Our sessions at the Actors Gym were so long that we would take a dinner break. I remember being outside, and it was still daylight out. Perhaps I was going to a nearby deli to gorge myself on Lipton’s cup-a-soup. I remember J. following me, catching up to me, and saying, squinting at me with those blue eyes, “I’d love to take you out.” I felt a small flutter up and down my nervous system. Here it is. I had felt that it was coming. But I also felt it with Donald. With Kenny. With Paul. With Michael. But J. had the balls to make the move. I liked J. He made me laugh. I remember during class once, he was up in front of the class, doing an “song and dance”, one of Strasberg’s acting exercises, being guided through it by Bobby, and it was excruciating thing to watch. I remember J. muttering to himself at one point, “I feel like I’m having a stroke”, and it was so dry, so witty, waves of laughter erupted through the warehouse room. He was self-deprecating, he was honest about feeling scared, he made sure the joke was always on him. I liked him. So when he asked me out, I said to him, “I’d love that!”

I hadn’t been on a date since college. I was no longer the same person. I was now a woman. I wasn’t a virgin. I don’t remember our first date, and as a matter of fact, all of our dates kind of blend together, although there are some spectacularly original and cinematic moments stuck in my brain, nuggets at the bottom of the sieve. I was like a starving woman faced with a full meal. I had a blast.

In retrospect, J. was my entryway into the Chicago actor life. He knew everyone. He was well liked. His social life was busy. He loved to go out. He loved meeting up with friends at the Melrose Diner at midnight after their shows got out. I would go with him. I met awesome people. J. knew weird things to do, odd events: miniature golf tournaments, weird matinees of performance artists who lathered paint over their body and screamed about their mothers, midnight double-features of Andy Warhol movies, secret raves in empty warehouses where you needed a password to get in. I never would have been up for all of that on my own. Without J., I probably would have holed myself up in my apartment, with the mattress on the floor, my meowing cat, my soup, and read. I was very into Jeanette Winterson at that point. The Passion was a lantern lighting the way. Villanelle – the red-headed cross-dressing web-footed gambler – the heroine of The Passion – took up space in my imagination. Her freedom, her intensity, her self-knowledge…domesticity would never be for her. If you tried to tame her, you would fail. But still: she could LOVE. I read that book over and over.

J. included me in his crazy whirl, and I was kind of surprised to find myself a social success. I lived in my first boyfriend’s shadow: he was elegant and cool, smooth, and everyone loved him. He made me feel awkward and unsure. None of that BULLSHIT was in operation: suddenly, on my own, meeting people, lookee here, everyone loves me. J. would call me after our nights out and say, laughing, “Well, once again, you were a huge hit last night.” “I was?” “Yeah. 2 of the guys and 1 of the girls asked me for your phone number.” “Really? Which ones? Tyler?” “Yeah. Tyler.” “I liked her.” “Yeah, well. She loved you.”

I did not take J. seriously, not as a potential boyfriend. I did not feel we were “moving towards” anything. I did not let him think this could ever “be” anything. I didn’t know much at that point but I did know that I would not be a girlfriend any time soon. No. No. No.

On our second or third date, J. and I sat in the back room of a bar which was just a house. There was no sign outside. I have no idea where we were in Chicago. I never knew where I was geographically in those first months. The city was so new. You walked into this place and it was a regular old house, with a living room, a kitchen and yet there was one room with a bar. You ordered drinks. Then you went and hung out in the house, wherever you could find a spot. We sat in a back room, by ourselves. It was dark, and there was a couch. There were stained glass windows, with lights shining behind them, deep blues and reds and blinding whites. I feel like I can’t be remembering this correctly, that essential expositionary details are lost, and perhaps this is true, but the fact remains: we were in a bar, that was in a regular house, and there were lit-up stained glass windows. We were alone.

J., in his charming way, grilled me on my life. I was the opposite of cagey. I was the bludgeoning giant, remember. Unconcerned with how I was coming across, unconcerned with the fact that maybe this person – this man sitting with me – actually was … a PERSON … who might be developing feelings for me. I answered his questions forthrightly. J. was hungry for information. This is true of most good actors: their religion is other people. Endless curiosity. J. turned that spotlight onto me. “Where’d you grow up?” “What was high school like?” “What was your first kiss?” “You moved here from where?” Tireless.

I do not remember the connecting of the dots, or how this came up, but I do remember: In the dark stained glass room I said to him, “Listen. We can hang out. I am having a BLAST right now.” (I was.) “But I will never be your girlfriend. I’m not into that right now. I am not into any of that. You need to know what you’re getting into.”

This was not a script. A “let’s not be exclusive” script. An “I’m just not that into you” script. I didn’t have enough experience for that. It was a bluntly spoken expression of what was going on. I liked J., and I loved how he was dragging me around the city, doing cool things. I went on, “But don’t ever introduce me as your girlfriend. If you do you’ll never see me again.” J. burst into laughter. We were both kind of drunk. The blues and reds of the stained glass piercing through the black. I said, “I’m serious. No girlfriend talk. I’m not into it.” J. said, “I’m fine with that.”

I had a bad premonition. So of course I spoke it out. “I feel like you’re gonna develop feelings for me. I am not available. If you think you can’t handle it, get out now.” “I’m not looking for anything serious right now either.”

It’s like I was the stereotypical guy, and he was the stereotypical girl. I felt like I wasn’t being believed. I said, “You’re not?” “No. Let’s just keep hanging out.” “J., remember what I said. If I hear the word ‘girlfriend’ out of your mouth…” Then J. attacked me. Okay, that’s more my speed. So I made out with J. in that black and red and blue lit back room, in the bar that was a house, in some unknowable neighborhood in Chicago.

And I learned it doesn’t matter how clear you are at the outset. Clarity does not save you. Things change. I said exactly what I meant to J. in a way that left no room for doubt. I even said it in what could be characterized as a mean way. I let him know of COURSE I would date Donald if he asked me. Why wouldn’t I?

I never said the real truth to my boyfriend, not until the very end when it was way too late. We always loved each other. That was what made it so horrible to break up. But I felt my own power with J., for the first time ever. I did not use it responsibly.

He would get mushy mushy on the phone. “I miss your sweet face.” I would cringe. It actually grossed me out.

And yet – when he would ask me to go out and do something – I said yes. The adventures were fast and furious with J. Some of the adventures took us to other states. We found ourselves joining up with insane wedding parties that we were not even a part of. We found ourselves gyrating to house music at some illegal party. We went to a gallery opening in a VERY sketchy neighborhood one night. The party began at one in the morning. Purple lightning forked the sky. We sat in this dumpy gallery on the 4th floor of a huge abandoned warehouse (empty warehouses were part of my introduction to Chicago, apparently), surrounded by people drinking cheap wine, with the windows occasionally flashing purple, and J. tried to be my boyfriend, and I would not let him. He would get touchy-feely, and I would say, “Member what I said months ago? You said you were okay with that.” I would talk with another guy in a stairwell for 20 minutes. I would flirt with the bartender. Something could happen. I was feeling conquest-possibility all the time:

I should have cut it off with him about 2 weeks in, because it was obvious almost immediately which way the wind was blowing. But J. knew such cool things to do … J. had such cool friends … J. listened to me, he was turned on by me – still a novelty experience for me … so fine. I will continue on, even though I realize he’s softening towards me – because I can rest easy in my conscience that I WAS CLEAR.

Cold as ice.

There was a night when there was a double-feature at the Music Box: Play It Again, Sam and Harold and Maude. Ted (the guy who had interviewed me for the Gym) lived across the hall from J. and somehow – maybe when I was over J.’s one day – the three of us decided to go see the double-feature. I didn’t know Ted that well, and as a matter of fact, I was intimidated by him. He was my teacher. He was brilliant. I looked UP to him. When Ted found out I had never seen Harold and Maude, he flipped out. It was his favorite movie of all time. I HAD to see it and he HAD to be there when I saw it so he could experience it through my eyes.

The double-feature night was the real beginning of my long friendship with Ted. He remembers it the same way. I watched Harold and Maude, sitting between these two men, and there was one point – when Uncle Victor’s one arm was stuck in the salute position – and you can see his silhouette, with the fake arm saluting his forehead, reflected in the puddle – and I started laughing so hard and so loudly that eventually I had to get up and leave the theatre. I stood in the lobby of The Music Box, leaning against the wall, HOWLING. Ted said he could hear me from in the theatre, and he absolutely loved it.

I finally came back into the theatre, but the second I saw the action continuing on up on the screen, I was gone again. I sat between them, and wept with laughter. Wept and wept and wept. Ted was beside himself with delight. He had seen the movie so many times. So for me to flip out to such an intense degree gave him such vicarious pleasure. Every time I would bark out a laugh, after trying to suppress it, Ted would start guffawing. People were getting annoyed by me. They were all old old Harold and Maude fans from way back. They had all seen it a gazillion times.

I was aware, dimly, that as my laughter intensified – and as audience members were growing annoyed by the girl obviously having an apoplectic fit 3 rows back – J. was getting irritated. He wasn’t having the same experience. He wasn’t delighted by my laughing fit, the way Ted was. At one point, J. said, smiling a bit, putting his hand on my arm, “Sh.”

And J. was TOAST from that moment on. He “sh”ed me when I was having FUN. I was suddenly in a white-hot RAGE. This is what I remembered from relationships. This is how my boyfriend behaved. Always trying to control me, tamp me down, trying to get me to express things in a more acceptable way. All of this may sound like an elaborate justification for my meanness to J., my coldness – the fact that I could so easily turn OFF – and to some degree it is a justification. We all come from somewhere. I came from a highly controlled and emotionally rigid relationship. J. “Sh”ed me, and I was DONE with being “sh”ed. No fucking MAN will ever “Sh” me again, pal. Especially not when I’m LAUGHING.

Two nights later I did what I should have done months before. I had J. over to my apartment to break up with him. I resented even having to ‘break up’ because all along I told him “this is not a relationship”. But it was now apparent I needed to stop seeing him. I had no experience with relationships. I was very bad at the whole thing. I found an echo of a conscience. I would miss the midnight gallery openings, and the secret raves. I would miss the sex. But I had to get rid of him before he “sh”ed me again and I punched him in the gums. I think maybe I felt I should get rid of him before he fell for me even further – but really, I got rid of him because he had become a drag. He fucking “Sh”ed me. Bye.

J. came over and I remember he brought flowers. I struggled to not throw them on the floor and stamp on them. My cat tiptoed around our feet, looking up at us anxiously, green eyes glowing. My mattress was on the floor. The windows from across the alley looked down on us. I leapt off the cliff, “I can’t see you anymore.”

There was a stunned silence. I was so wrapped up in myself, so much a giant Id, it never once even occurred to me that he would be surprised or hurt by the news. I assumed he would be like, “Yeah, I’ve seen this coming.” But that was not how it went. I don’t remember what he said, but we had a long conversation where he told me he was falling in love with me. At one point – it came out of nowhere – he put his hands over his face and started to cry. I was horrified and embarrassed.

To be honest, what was going through my head was: It’s almost over. Our conversation is nearing its completion, and the door will close behind him, and I will be alone again without anything dragging me down. Soon he’ll be gone, and I’ll hear him yank open the elevator gate, and I’ll hear the elevator creakily start up, and hear the cranks moving him down the shaft, away from me … and I’m not sorry. I want some Lipton’s.

I had always been hurt by what I perceived as men’s ability to turn on and off the faucet. Turn ON the romance faucet and then turn it OFF. My ex-boyfriend did it. He turned OFF the romance switch with me, and within a matter of weeks, turned it ON with someone else. The thing about J. was, I never turned on any faucet. I had fun with him but all faucets were OFF. Later, years later, he was in New York, reached out, and we went out for a drink. We reminisced. He said, “You were so detached. I could never get to you.”

Even now, I’m surprised at how cold I was, how cold my fury was at the “Sh”, and how easily I tossed him to the curb. A couple months later, my sense of proportion was back. M. had arrived. He suited me much better, and the constantly-vigilant hyper-awake adrenaline rush ebbed out with the tide, I eased into my new circumstances, my new self. I started to fit into my new skin.

I became a normal-sized woman again, not a Robert Crumb giant.

J. was a casualty.

I told him exactly who I was with diamond clarity. He said, “That’s fine by me”. And he meant it. For a while he meant it.

Until he realized I actually meant what I said too. I told you. I told you I was treacherous.

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13 Responses to The Giant

  1. RTG says:

    Thank you. Bless you.

    I know, I know.

  2. mitchell says:

    …wow…a good guy…u are tough!(said like Shirley to Meryl in “Postcards”)…im soo about to show up in this story..im just around the corner chronologically…this peice reads like an obit??? is he okay..somewhere?

  3. red says:

    Mitchell – Oh he’s fine. Weirdly – I just saw him a couple years ago. He was coming thru New York and he looked me up. It was fun. I got to be nice to him, as opposed to mean and tough as nails.

  4. mitchell says:

    thats nice to hear..i was a little worried.

  5. amelie / rae says:

    i really liked this piece, and yet i felt kinda bad about it — because pretty much every time you mentioned Donald, it was “uhm, Donald,” and i laughed so hard. you know, “sexy (like, uh, Donald. because he’s such a paragon, for everything. but i hesitate to tell you that, because you might get the wrong idea about, uhm, Donald. and me.)”

  6. tracey says:

    You are brave. I loved it.

  7. Marisa says:

    Wow. I love how you write ANYWAY but when you write something I can personally relate to very well it’s just so immedate and striking.

    …and I love how you pepper any recollection with myriad details and asides that bring everything to vibrant life.

  8. elata says:

    I was most recently in his position – very attached to a guy who was point-blank about his unavailability. And yet your story made me laugh at the pathos of it all. Especially the not caring at the end. What hubris on his part to see who you were, hear who you were and assume that he could just “get through” to you, change you, actualize you, make you a better person. I can understand that you regret having hurt him, and I think that’s very giving of you. I guess there’s an equilibrium somewhere between diamond-hard OFF and no-backbone ON. I hope you’ve found it. Hell, I hope I find it.

  9. amelie / rae says:

    i hope my comment didn’t offend you, sheila. it was just the one humourous thing i found in the piece, because the rest said so much in terms of identity and relationship.

  10. Ceci says:

    I loved reading this, Sheila, thanks for sharing! You are so brave, girl…

  11. Alex says:

    Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

    Thank you Sheila.

  12. Jon says:

    This is fantastic stuff, Sheila. Are you continuing to work on it? It feels very alive and important, reminding me at times (for whatever obvious or un-obvious reasons) of Mary Gaitskill’s work (have you read “Veronica?” you must if you haven’t…) and also Alice Munro’s (esp. the trio of connected tales in “Runaway,” also a must.)

    So, there. Enough musts and shoulds. But they came from being moved. Hope to see more.

    xo j.m.

  13. matthew says:

    I also saw Harold & Maude for the first time at the Music Box theatre when it was shown as a double feature with Play It Again Sam, back in the early ’90s. I had gone there intending only to see the Woody Allen picture, but I decided to stay for Harold & Maude since I had nothing else to do. I knew nothing about the movie except for its title. It came as a huge surprise to me and ended up having one of the most enjoyable times that I have ever had in a movie theater.

    This coincidence is very trivial, but to me that’s part of what makes it so striking. I’m searching the Internet for something unrelated to this and I come across someone who has this trivial but at the same time unique and personal experience in common with me. I just had to mention it.

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