Victim of Circumstance

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 – The Truth

2 – Things Will Happen to You

3 – Eleanor Roosevelt

4 – The Actor

5 – The Purple Gorilla

6 – Ville de L’Amour

7 – Why I Hate Vampires

8 – No Surprises

9 – The Invisible

10 – A Thousand Kisses Deep

11 – The Second–to–Last Time We Said Goodbye

12 – Desmond Miles

13 – The Fiction

Acknowledgments / Afterword

About The Author

Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

– Hermann Hesse

Guilt can cause a man to act against his own best interests, but desire can do that as well, and when guilt and desire are mixed up equally in a man’s heart, that man is apt to do strange things.

– Paul Auster

When you’re looking for someone, you’re looking for some aspect of yourself even if you don’t know it…What we’re searching for is what we lack.

– Sam Shepard

Love mistakes a pimple for a dimple.

(Japanese Proverb)

1

THE TRUTH

When I was a kid, I met Orson Welles on a beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Not surprisingly, it didn’t go well; nor did our conversation, as one-sided as it was, last long. I was alone and, back then at least, had the balls to approach Orson Welles, who himself, apparently, didn’t want to be disturbed. That was the gist I took away from our brief conversation – if you could call it a conversation – as he just kept saying in my general direction the same three words over and over again: Get lost, kid.

I guess, looking back on my life since that summer day, I did exactly what Orson Welles told me to do. I got lost. I got lost in life and, to quote everyone’s favorite band that no one will ever admit, Air Supply, I’m fairly sure I got Lost in Love too; and worse, the lyric that followed, about not knowing why, really resonated with me.

I often wonder, though: does anyone really know much about love and/or getting lost in it, especially when, outside of this indescribable and seemingly un-graspable truth, something happens that is completely unexpected? Sure, a lot of people try to make their living in this world by predicting the future, especially yours if you’re willing to fund it, but even discounting the undeniable mysteries of our expanding universe, no one can really know what’s going to happen, or why. If fortune-tellers could really see the future, could they not see their own future as impoverished fortune-tellers trying to make a living?

I used to think, as I reached middle age, that I couldn’t possibly be surprised anymore by the twists and turns of life (even without the supposed natural gift of a fortune-teller), but I was wrong… so very wrong.

I didn’t know this yet, at least not fully; not enough to convince myself that uncertainty still existed and alter my course because of it. At the time of this discovery, I was sitting by myself in a chic wine bar quietly nestled between a dying bookstore (as if there were any other kind) and an overpriced movie theater that had more comfortable seats than any seat I had ever owned, sipping from a glass of red wine… Ah, red wine, that miraculous invention that could either momentarily annihilate the past or bring it back full-force as if a thousand waves from the ocean had struck me at the same time. (In this particular case, it would be the latter, and I would drown in the riptide of it for a while.)

Finishing my first leg of a flight of Malbec, it dawned on me that once life holds no more surprises you’re most likely dead, and, as far as I could tell, I wasn’t dead yet… although in a matter of months I would come very close to it. But even back then, what did I want to live the remainder of my life for? To play the back nine as they say (whoever they is)? To seek and find justice? No, that couldn’t be. One thing I already knew was that life didn’t offer justice, at least not the kind that would bring anyone complete peace. Was complete peace even possible? Was there a type of peace that wasn’t complete? Did peace in itself even exist? Did anything really exist? Did I? Maybe I was just a supporting character in someone else’s dream… or, was everything just my own hallucination? If this was so, and I was actually dreaming this whole thing, when would I wake up? Or, more importantly, where would I wake up? And who would I find looking down at me as my eyes opened for the very first time?

I find dreams fascinating because they’re either the result of something that’s happening to your body at the very same time as the dream, such as dreaming of water when, in actuality, you have to urinate; or dreaming you’re in the desert under the blazing sun like Lawrence of Arabia when, in actuality, you’re lying in a pool of sweat and sticking to your sheets because your bedroom is too hot. There are definitely those types of dreams, the ones based in physiology alone.

Then, of course, as modern psychology has introduced via Freud and others, there are dreams of the subconscious, which, for me, have been almost textbook. You have the dream where you’re falling, the dream where your teeth are falling out, the dream where you’re being chased, etc. The list goes on and on, and all of these scenarios, it seems, have something to do with fear or anxiety or a general lack of control in your life, or some combination of these universal feelings.

One night while I was writing this book, I had a dream that would have made Freud and Jung hungry for more. I was on an outdoor track that was fenced in, among a group of people who were apparently about to race each other. We all just stood there, waiting to race, and it was evident that, even though there were many of us, we were preparing to compete one-on-one, so we immediately started to pair up without saying anything to each other. It was as if we knew what we had to do. Naturally, though, everyone paired up quickly but me. I started to panic, as I didn’t want to be the odd man out, but soon enough, out of nowhere, someone became my partner, or competitor I should say. Almost immediately, however, before I could breathe a sigh of relief that I had someone, they changed their mind for some reason and I was partner-less again. Luckily, as soon as I lost my first partner, I suddenly had a new one.

The next minute we were all racing, and even though we were paired up, we somehow ran as a unified group towards some unknown finish line. It was difficult for me to run because I felt weighed down, as if I were a large, anchored ship. And the unknown finish line, which there was no way I would reach regardless, became even more unknown when I realized that, somehow, several of the runners had broken through the fence and were running down a street full of speeding cars. That was when it occurred to me that this group was actually trying to save someone who had broken through on their own. They threw themselves at the lone escaped runner, trying to prevent this person from getting hit by an oncoming car, but ended up getting hit themselves. Despite all the crashes around him, the escaped runner seemed to be completely safe in the middle of all this and, even more strangely, was either totally ignorant of or apathetic to the danger he was in.

I was not the lone escaped runner, however, as I’d thought I might be; I was still on the track, standing inside the now gaping fence, trying to catch my breath and just observing the mayhem in front of me, wondering what the hell was going on. I don’t remember if there was anyone else still on the track with me or if I was alone but, just before I woke, I realized two things. One, why wasn’t I running down the street with everyone else, especially considering the giant hole in the fence in front of me? And, two, I somehow knew that the lone escaped runner wasn’t ignorant or apathetic at all, actually, of the danger he was in. He was simply not afraid of anything and that was why he was safe.

(I would later watch a documentary about Woody Allen where he said matter-of-factly that he was probably successful because he was never afraid of failing.)

I woke from this dream of the runners, not sweaty or physically encumbered – but anxious and scared of the new day that was then upon me.

On the second leg of my flight of Argentinian Malbec, I stared at an empty text bubble on my iPhone, waiting for my old friend to write something back that would somehow make sense of everything that had happened – but nothing she could say would make it go away. Nothing she could say would change the course of events that had transpired, leaving me adrift in a flood of all my past mistakes and regrets, which now floated by just slowly enough for me to get a good look at each and every one.

I sometimes wondered why I bothered to drink alcohol. It just made me drowsy and sad (it is a depressant after all), and no matter how much I slept, interrupted or not, I remained exhausted, within and without, every day waking up to the same reality, or un-reality as it were, being I still couldn’t escape the feeling that nothing was real… or maybe that was merely what I wanted to think was true. Hell, if that was indeed true, everything – and I mean everything – would completely make sense (because it would have to).

I noticed a man nearby with the sideways-eight infinity symbol tattooed on his left forearm. It made me wonder what infinity really is. If you think about it, really think about what infinity is, it isn’t emotionally acceptable at all. It’s like what my former father-in-law from my first marriage once said to me (a scientist, of course, just like my own father had more or less been) – that there is the possibility, just the possibility, that the universe always existed. In other words, it never began. Everything, apparently, has an end, or at least all living things, but there was suddenly this possibility that not everything had a beginning. But if everything has an end, as we know it, this brought me back to my original question, which was, how could infinity exist? And if it did exist, then I couldn’t even grasp the idea that the universe might have no beginning and no end. It would mean the universe is an infinite loop, like a screensaver that’s always on and won’t go away no matter how hard you hit the keys or move the mouse.

Infinity aside… but then, can you really put something like infinity aside? I wish I could ask my former father-in-law that question now, although, knowing him, if something can exist without beginning, anything is possible. And you know what that means? It means that science is bullshit and, therefore, everything is bullshit. But if he’s not certain, how can anyone be?

Personally, I wasn’t certain about anything. I literally had no idea what would happen or where I would go because of it. My future was just a huge question mark with infinite exclamation marks following it. I had no family to speak of, no home, nowhere I needed to be; no one was waiting for me or relying on me for anything. No one required my love or attention or needed to trust me in any way. I was a gypsy because life had made me one, whether I wanted to be or not… but not belonging to the world did have its benefits. I could come and go as I pleased, and whatever happened, or didn’t happen, would be no one’s fault but my own.

I had come out of a movie a short time before and, as I headed to my car, heard live music in the distance, so I turned towards the noise and headed that way. I had no one waiting for me, no child to pick up, no babysitter to pay – nothing but an empty, probably freezing hotel room since I’d left the a/c on arctic blast before the movie (it seemed to be the only setting).

That was how I came to the wine bar – two God-awful covers later and thankfully the end of their set: one a recent hit song, and the other not so recent, but both sounding like bad karaoke – waiting for my friend’s text and thinking about what a great word Malbec was… and wondering, if I thought about stuff long enough,