MYTHRAS AND TAURUS
For the past five years, philosopher Eckhart Tolle has inspired and influenced my life and my writing, bringing profound moments of peace and presence into my daily experience, with his insight into the human condition, consciousness and the ego.
The dysfunction of the Egoic mind attempts, incessantly, to pull us in either direction, away from the present moment. If there is no problem in the present moment, the ego will try to create one with our thoughts, making up stories about what happened or what will happen. For most of us, these thoughts are repetitive and predominately negative, though sometimes the ego cleverly disguises fear as "hope", while in reality they are merely two sides of the same coin. While repetitive, negative thoughts about the future usually involve anxiety and expectation, mentally preparing ourselves for imagined, future encounters or experiences with other people; negative and repetitive thoughts about the past tend to center on regret.
MYTHRAS AND TAURUS is the story of a man's reckoning with regret, confronting his past in one raw, honest and uncensored communication, revealing his frailties, his faults, his inner demons to a woman who could potentially destroy his life. A woman to whom he owes a tremendous debt. In doing so, Nathan unearths a long buried secret about her past, the mystery of her childhood, and the lies she has lived with for far too long.
The first fifteen of the story's twenty-three pages are pasted below. Please contact me if you'd like a copy of the story in its entirety.
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The dysfunction of the Egoic mind attempts, incessantly, to pull us in either direction, away from the present moment. If there is no problem in the present moment, the ego will try to create one with our thoughts, making up stories about what happened or what will happen. For most of us, these thoughts are repetitive and predominately negative, though sometimes the ego cleverly disguises fear as "hope", while in reality they are merely two sides of the same coin. While repetitive, negative thoughts about the future usually involve anxiety and expectation, mentally preparing ourselves for imagined, future encounters or experiences with other people; negative and repetitive thoughts about the past tend to center on regret.
MYTHRAS AND TAURUS is the story of a man's reckoning with regret, confronting his past in one raw, honest and uncensored communication, revealing his frailties, his faults, his inner demons to a woman who could potentially destroy his life. A woman to whom he owes a tremendous debt. In doing so, Nathan unearths a long buried secret about her past, the mystery of her childhood, and the lies she has lived with for far too long.
The first fifteen of the story's twenty-three pages are pasted below. Please contact me if you'd like a copy of the story in its entirety.
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As a general rule I ignore Twitter notifications but when I saw your uncommon name with that byline, 25 yr. old Activist Mythras Bennett Defeats Michigan’s Most Powerful Congressional Rep in Landslide, my fingertips tingled.
A beatific photo. Smartphones held aloft for pics. Business suits shaking manicured hands. Your campaign banner looks like an album cover for Rise Against. Smiles all around. No inquiries yet about your parents, your formative years. I know you didn’t win the presidency, but with this much state-wide attention, you can expect those questions soon, and my chest constricts when I picture you struggling to answer.
From what you know of your parents, from your Nana, your mother got pregnant with you from her boyfriend Brent, and when Child Services took you away from them, the state handed you over to next of kin, to Daphne’s mother. Your Nana. Two parts of that statement are true, and one is a lie. The lie is a secret Daphne and Brent did not wish to acknowledge before they died, and it’s the reason I’m writing you now.
I keep reminding myself: none of what I’m telling you is inappropriate. Even looking at your radiant photo in the tweet, I have to keep in mind you no longer look the way I remember, padding around barefoot in a jingling exer-saucer. That I’m talking to another adult, one forced to grow up much faster than I did, and I don’t have to censor myself here.
The most important secret kept from your Nana was the one that brought the three of us together – the Bennetts and I - like a rare planetary alignment: that Daphne and Brent were bisexual. While that didn’t bother me, and almost certainly wouldn’t bother you, Daphne’s parents came from Hell’s Kitchen and a deeply entrenched Catholic upbringing, and your Nana, born just after WWII to a WAAC lab technician and a Marine Corps Master Sergeant, would have found the idea unpalatable. Informing her about it would have influenced the way she spoke of Daphne to you after your mother died, so I’m glad Daphne and Brent kept her in the dark about it. They wouldn’t have found this difficult because Nana, the only family member your Mom had any contact with, lived in Reno and socialized with no one except her next-door neighbor, fifteen years her senior and senile.
Sexual orientation becomes important on my side of the story, because I could not have lived with them or had an affair with your mother had the Bennetts lived as a heterosexual couple. They were not swingers, and even if they were, I had no one to bring to the party. Bisexual relationships come in infinite varieties, and the Bennetts’ always appeared to be one of mutual exclusivity, meaning when Brent spent the night with a man, Daphne stayed out of the room and vice versa. These rules of engagement sanctioned the “open” marriage between them, in which fidelity did not stand as the irreversible deal breaker that it does in more traditional unions.
Daphne said once, in the early months of our year together, that everyone is bisexual. Some of us take it for a test drive while others leave the Maserati in the lot, and that’s fine because that second guy is me, leaving his untouched sports car to gather dust and cobwebs until the battery dies and I’m too old to drive anymore. I’ve never been an adventurous sort.
The worst moment of that year, for me, came when you and I sat alone in the little kitchen nook in your Nana’s apartment, with its mallard wallpaper and smudgy paintings of wharfs in that Currier & Ives style that always reminds me of deli mustard that’s dried to a crust. We’d only been visiting you for forty minutes – Daphne, Brent and I – but the Bennetts had already headed to the balcony to finish the blunt they started in the car. And the last words between the three of us had long since passed.
Brent especially seemed reluctant to leave me alone with you and kept peering through the slider with a look that said: Nathan, you can leave anytime you want. You were precocious enough to communicate your preferences pretty clearly at two years old, and that’s what made him nervous. You could hold a conversation. Transformers over Muppet Babies. Crunch Berries over Coco Puffs. But I didn’t reveal to you then what Brent feared I would. I’m not sure you would have understood anyway, precocious or not.
Your Nana attended the Chicken Marsala on the stovetop, her back to us, and the scent of sautéed wine and mushrooms assaulted my half-baked mind as you opened the heart-shaped locket around your neck and pointed to the picture inside. You said: “This Mommy and Daddy.” Nana glanced back, her fingertips crumbling oregano over the pot, and the dark look on her face had nothing to do with me and everything to do with Daphne and Brent leaving you for the open air of the balcony. To her, it must have appeared dismissive, as if you were an amusement whose novelty had just grown stale, and that would have aged her a bit faster than most days.
I’m still not sure what made me the most miserable at that moment: that Nana and I were the only ones in the room to hear you say it, the thrill in your gap-tooth smile, or that I was too much of a coward to correct you.
Brent never once interested me, not even as a friend, but I remained smitten with your mother Daphne since I left Grammar School. The Fates, determined to torture me like Prometheus pecked to pieces on the rock, scheduled nearly every one of our classes together from 7th to 11th Grade.
She said we’d never be more than friends, and those six words still bring a hot flush to my cheeks. We can be friends is the most ludicrous thing women say to men they don’t find attractive. In the history of man, has there ever been a masochist at that point who says, “Great! Let me get your number! We can play racquetball. And when we do, please tell me all about the men you are attracted to.”
But I conceded the fight and continued to fantasize about her day and night, in waking life and in my most humiliating nightmares. At school, she ignored the staring problem I had with her cleavage, her eyes, her legs, and every moment that she clenched or flirted with my handful of friends. Actually, friends might be too strong a word. The handful of guys I followed around.
Fantasize isn’t a big enough word because I had an entire lifetime planned out with Daphne. One that started with her pivotal moment of revelation, when she would finally reciprocate my obsession. As I lay in bed at fifteen, staring up at the faded glow-stars my Dad stuck to my ceiling when I was nine, I envisioned the evening when the voluptuous Daphne Bennett saw through Nate Bentley’s angular, shallow-chested exterior and into the brilliance of the lyrical troubadour within. C’est L’amour. And it can be as absurd as you want it to when it stays in your own mind.
She would show up at my front door, her hair heavy and darkened by an unexpected rain, her strong piano hands cold and damp as she cups my chin on her entrance. For this version of Daphne, and I had conceived many, the chin-cupping was how she signaled to everyone that she had lost interest in that guy and had moved on to this guy. In the fantasy, I had just become this guy.
She mumbles some explanation about how she felt just a bit too buzzed to drive all the way home from the party (it doesn’t matter where the party is because I wouldn’t have been invited), and she recognized my house from her piano lessons. I should footnote here that this part is actually plausible. A smidgen of truth can enhance any fantasy. A handful of spice tossed in to your spaghetti sauce.
As a toddler, your Mom took these lessons from my live-in Nanny. My own mother allowed the Nanny to give lessons with the Baby Grand on our estate, to supplement her income, and I watched your Mom from between the bars of the stair railing, even back then, when we were both knee-high.
As I grab a towel for her wet hair, thanking God my parents are in Cleveland for a Bar Mitzvah, her dripping hourglass form, rainwater glistening under the chandelier, moves to my open Mead spiral notebook on the table, next to my acoustic guitar.
“Did you write this?” she asks upon my return, cupping the book against the shelf of her breasts.
“Yeah, it’s just a bunch of songs.”
“It’s about me,” she mutters, wide-eyed, only half a question, and when I nod, that seals her revelation. Cue the Top Gun sequence. All of a sudden Charlie is chasing Maverick and she just doesn’t want anyone else to know that she’s fallen for him. And that’s okay. Our lifelong romance begins as her rain-soaked jacket and sports-top slop onto the kitchen tile.
That was my favorite fantasy. And I had many. No experience with Daphne ever came close to the ecstasy of that dream sequence and I don’t begrudge her that. No one on Earth can ever eclipse the fantasy you’ve created about them.
But what made Daphne so alluring, to me and every guy I knew, was that she didn’t want to be anyone’s fantasy. At least that’s the way she seemed to me in high school. I only saw make up on her at Halloween, and she changed out of her dusty Adidas only for Winter Formal and Prom.
In the 80’s movies I saw growing up – Some Kind of Wonderful, Pretty in Pink – the popular kids were always the rich ones. I couldn’t reconcile this with my reality. A paradigm of the adult world’s elite transferring status to their children in the classroom. In these films, the prettiest girls were always the wealthiest as if beauties could not be born from poor people – and in the rare case that they were, they lacked the necessary funds to dress like and therefore socialize with rich beauties.
Nearly all the sports-coat wearing boys rich girls slept with were doe-eyed, soft and skinny. When these guys pursued girls from poor families, no matter how charming or beautiful the girls were, they called it “slumming.” And like the moronic rationale of the star-bellied sneetch, everyone at their high school simply assumes and accepts that their parents’ financial status makes them better than ordinary mortals.
Even at fifteen, I watched these films asking: Where in the world are these high schools supposed to be? Because it certainly didn’t apply to my teenage world. Money did not buy status, and while Daphne had friends with money and friends as poor as she was, none of them would ever consider the taboo of flaunting their privileged life. At Capo High, the rich kids were the most insecure, always afraid of being exploited, always afraid that the Friday night crowd would show up at their estate not because they were adored, but because they had the widest square footage.
Girls at Capo didn’t respond to privilege or wealth or shiny cars and they didn’t want to be pampered. They respected guys who came from adversity and struggle. And not a single girl at Capo thought that nerds were cool. Nerds were boys who looked like they would likely remain boys forever because that’s how their Moms preferred it. All four years there seemed to be this unspoken but pervasive consensus that nerds – in the Beach Cities they used euphemisms like kook - were contemptibly underdeveloped – a throwback in evolution. They looked sticky and bendable and not anything worth touching.
That wasn’t just whiny paranoia, either. At Capo it often felt like policy. I had girls – not Daphne – but girls I asked on a date, insinuate this sentiment to my face, their faces pinched with revulsion. Not all girls held such contempt – some were like Daphne and treated outsiders with a magnanimous pity. But most of the time, the social dynamics at Capo High in the early 90’s often reminded me of Ancient Sparta.
I know my experience would have been much different if I went to private school, but my Dad said time and again that private schools would “cocoon” me in a world without challenges.
The real Daphne moved to San Diego the summer before our senior year, when your grandparents divorced and your Nana raised her only daughter by getting a second job in the graveyard shift – monitoring people in Mississippi on electronic house arrest.
As Daphne put it: “My senior year, my Mom and I passed each other on the stairs, and that was about it.” For an immensely popular girl like Daphne, your Nana’s absence – she came home only six hours a day, to sleep - gave her an eagerly anticipated freedom, and because she turned eighteen just two months into her senior year, she could call herself out sick from school whenever she wanted. She did so at least once a week.
I heard all this two years after the fact, of course. She had long left Capo High, where she had tortured me with her presence from Freshman to Junior year. In some ways, I found as much relief as I did misery in her absence from the halls, because by 11th grade, as we became estranged by our shifting social circles (mine diminishing as hers expanded) my staring problem had become far more acute, more distant, and hence, far more embarrassing.
Two years after high school graduation, I was living in the dorm at Berkeley with the other trust fund babies, zero interest in my Sociology major, and a roommate who only took off his headphones to remind me about my turn to take out the trash, which always stank of fly-blown guacamole because the guy did a late-snack run to Rigoberto’s every single night.
When Daphne called – the phone number in her yearbook led to my parents, who led her to the dorm – and I recognized her voice, I drew concentric circles into my desktop calendar until I carved through it from June to November and pinched my brittle chin whiskers so hard it gave me a rash.
With eight days left before Summer Break and no other plans but to go back home and resume my seasonal golf lessons with the folks, I accepted her invitation to visit her on Coronado Island, when I could muster enough air to respond.
We covered every topic of post-adolescent life that night on the phone, except the fact that she’d married Brent. Don’t ask, don’t tell. She didn’t want me to know until I flew south, and there was no way I was going to ask who she was dating and shatter my grand delusions.
On the plane ride I treated myself to Business Class and in my recliner soon became obsessed with sucking in my gut, which had grown considerably as my metabolism diminished since graduation. Daphne awaited me, alone, at the Orange Julius in the terminal.
That description isn’t worthy of such a pivotal moment so let’s try again. Daphne Bennett, who had occupied my mind’s eye every day since I was twelve, was waiting for me, alone, under the J in Julius, wearing her white smile, a drawstring psychedelic pouch and one of those striped Tijuana ponchos everybody trashed at the turn of the millennium.
She greeted me with an embrace that felt strong as a sack from a linebacker, the fingertips of her piano hands digging into my love handles, her breasts girdled under my heaving diaphragm. And with her head against my chest, I watched her eyes close.
Mine did as well, and when I looked again at the terminal, the Mcdonald’s sign had morphed into a blurry yellow caterpillar. The line between fantasy and reality, for one critical moment, had just gone hazy.
Is it strange that I felt relieved and not disappointed that your mother had gained twenty pounds herself? Not just because I could immediately release the tension in my gut. Not because every step Daphne took away from perfection felt like a step towards attainable for me. Somehow, appearing human and not as a manifested goddess made the moment more real. This was my life. This was happening. Even if it never got better than this, it was happening.
As we left the airport, Daphne cracked her Camry’s driver-side window and retrieved from the ash tray a joint wrapped in cigar leaves. Before cannabis was legal this was called a blunt, and I don’t think that’s changed, but as I said, I’m just as out of the loop now as I was then.
She pumped the lighter, lit it up, then took a long drag and passed it, saying, “So, we got a condo ‘cross from the military base. We can do jet-skis in the morning.”
That second ‘we’ was transcendent for a guy who lives out most of his life in his imagination. Daphne in a bikini, arms around my waist from behind on the backseat of a Wave Runner as I revved the throttle. That first ‘we,’ however, sounded ominous.
“‘We?’”
Her lip curled and she inhaled deep, as if this would be a long answer. Then she glanced over at the burning blunt in my hand, which I was scowling at as if it were a big brown turd. Prompting me.
This blunt began my experience with drugs. Not because I abstained from them or had any will power. Will power? Me? If Daphne had said, “We can climb into the shower together when we get back to the condo, but first I want to play chicken with the oncoming traffic,” I would have nodded and smiled. If she’d said she had a body in the trunk, and I could spend a single night with her if I helped dispose of it, I would have offered to do the digging. As far as drugs go, I hadn’t done it before simply because no one had offered, and I certainly didn’t hang out with anybody who sold it.
Modeling Daphne, I took a deep drag, held it, then lapsed into a fifteen second coughing convulsion. On TV this real-life cliché is sometimes met with uproarious laughter, but it’s really not that funny. Daphne responded by lowering the window further and cranking up the volume on Marilyn Manson, as if coughing killed her high.
We reached the highway loops that cross over into Coronado Island. The lights on the overpass blurred together until I blinked, then one of them transformed into the illuminated face of Roman emperor Caligula, a face carved marble – an orb which grew a serpent’s tail and weaved its way up into the night sky, growing larger with every slithery movement, which I followed from the window to the windshield.
Caligula’s orb centered above us in the sky and his tail snapped off like a withered foreskin. He needed it only to travel here, for this was his place, an upgraded moon eclipsing the sun.
Back in the car, the song’s dark and prophetic lyrics coincided with the global transformation above us. Prick your finger, it is done. The moon has now eclipsed the sun. Angel has spread its wings. The time has come for bitter things.
Caligula’s face yawned within the gigantic sun orb, his jaws stretching past the python point, and as they snapped the orb exploded, raining green. It reminded me of a Nickelodeon program I saw as a kid, one in which they dumped green slime on the kids.
“You Can’t Do That On Television.”
Daphne turned her sleepy, slow eyes with a smirk. “What’s that?”
I grimaced at the windshield. “You’re not gonna hit the wipers?”
She took the blunt from my hand. “Are you okay?”
I pressed the meat of my palm into one eye. “Yeah, I just...didn’t expect to see things that aren’t there.”
“It’s dusted. You’ll get used to it. What I said before, about ‘we’...it’s an open marriage. You’ll have to get used to that, too.”
My thoughts still cloudy, at the time all I understood was that Daphne was talking about marriage and I was the only one in the car. “Okay.”
She pulled into her spot under a palm tree in front of a beige condo with a bamboo trim. Slightly cheesy island theme. Then she leaned in close, setting her tan forearm with its strawberry blonde hairs on the middle console, and the blunt back in the ash tray. “You ever get nostalgic?”
I could smell lavender in her hair, mango on her freckled skin, appreciating for a moment that unlike fantasy, reality includes all of the five senses. “All the time. In fact, I think more about the past than the future.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem. Some people think living in the past keeps you from achieving your goals. But it’s the past, and only the past, that defines us. Past thoughts and past regrets. Everything else is imagination. A future that doesn’t exist outside of your own mind. Because the future never arrives exactly as you pictured it, does it? And someday, all of that will be over, too.”
“All that what?”
“You know what. Lights out. All your remembering and all your imagining. It won’t exist anymore. Because you won’t exist. And you won’t even be around to know that you don’t exist. You won’t be able to think about it.”
Like most infatuations, the one I had with your mother transformed everything she said into profound gospel, but I was soon to discover this past / future paradigm, philosophy, whatever it was, justified her (and eventually our) stagnation.
“I was looking for the humidifier in the attic,” Daphne continued. “And I found my stack of yearbooks. 7th to 11th grade. Did you know our class pictures are side by side every time – every book?”
I cut the air into sections with one hand. “Bennett. Bentley.”
Daphne flashed me her fence of white teeth. “I don’t think there is a last name in the alphabet between us. I laid those yearbooks out, chronologically, side by side, and watched us grow up together.”
“We didn’t grow up together.”
“No.” Daphne worked a bit of the cigar leaf from behind her teeth and spat it into the well of the passenger seat. “You remember what I said when you asked me to the 8th grade dance?”
“I think you know that I remember everything you ever said to me. So why don’t you just tell me.”
“We will never be more than friends.”
“Yeah.”
She retrieved the blunt, relit it. “That was cruel. I remember your face.” She puffed twice then drew deep. “You know what?” Daphne hiccupped with a mouth full of beige smoke. I leaned in close when she curled her index finger and flinched a little when she wrapped one of her long hands around the nape of my neck. Her mouth barely cracked open. “I lied,” she croaked.
Then she pressed her full lips against mine and exhaled. With my greatest will I managed not to cough again, held together only by the desire that she keep her mouth there.
That’s as good as it every got. No jet skis the next day or the day after, or ever in the year I lived at the condo with Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. Drugs, every hour on the hour, have a way of stagnating plans until they’re forgotten. But I certainly have no right to bitch about it. The drugs enhanced, or exacerbated, depending on what year you ask me, the dream-like experience of living with a woman I’d previously known best when I was alone in a room.
I know you must not have many memories of Daphne. I accompanied she and Brent on only one of the visits they made to you at Nana’s apartment, and Daphne told me she’d gone to see you only once before. I do know that Daphne and Brent O.D.’d eight months apart, and that they both died before you were three.
I wish like hell I could give you a happier story. One about how I always gave Brent shit about cooking the burgers too long on the barbecue until they tasted like hockey pucks. Or how the monkeys in India jumped on Daphne’s back when we all went white water rafting on the Dandeli River. But none of those things could ever happen. From my first night there, from Brent’s first bored and indifferent greeting, I knew I wasn’t the first time his wife had gone “slumming” outside of their clique, with her former admirers.
The three of us together – Brent, Daphne and I – were dysfunctional at best and abusive at worst. Our relationship was based on shared addictions, which came to encompass drugs far more expensive than PCP laced blunts. But these addictions ran deeper than what we cut up and sectioned off on the mixing slab. I fed Daphne’s addiction to nostalgia, to a time when she could feel adoring and longing eyes as she walked the halls, among the slamming lockers, cursing and grunts and hoots – the cacophony between classes. And it turned out I’d been wrong. Daphne did like being the stuff of men’s fantasies.
By merely standing in the room, by kissing me when Brent was gone, by sleeping in my guest bed, she fed my addiction to the ludicrous fantasy that somehow, if I just stayed long enough, Brent would go away.
That’s how it started, anyway...
(Please contact me if you'd like a copy of this story.)
A beatific photo. Smartphones held aloft for pics. Business suits shaking manicured hands. Your campaign banner looks like an album cover for Rise Against. Smiles all around. No inquiries yet about your parents, your formative years. I know you didn’t win the presidency, but with this much state-wide attention, you can expect those questions soon, and my chest constricts when I picture you struggling to answer.
From what you know of your parents, from your Nana, your mother got pregnant with you from her boyfriend Brent, and when Child Services took you away from them, the state handed you over to next of kin, to Daphne’s mother. Your Nana. Two parts of that statement are true, and one is a lie. The lie is a secret Daphne and Brent did not wish to acknowledge before they died, and it’s the reason I’m writing you now.
I keep reminding myself: none of what I’m telling you is inappropriate. Even looking at your radiant photo in the tweet, I have to keep in mind you no longer look the way I remember, padding around barefoot in a jingling exer-saucer. That I’m talking to another adult, one forced to grow up much faster than I did, and I don’t have to censor myself here.
The most important secret kept from your Nana was the one that brought the three of us together – the Bennetts and I - like a rare planetary alignment: that Daphne and Brent were bisexual. While that didn’t bother me, and almost certainly wouldn’t bother you, Daphne’s parents came from Hell’s Kitchen and a deeply entrenched Catholic upbringing, and your Nana, born just after WWII to a WAAC lab technician and a Marine Corps Master Sergeant, would have found the idea unpalatable. Informing her about it would have influenced the way she spoke of Daphne to you after your mother died, so I’m glad Daphne and Brent kept her in the dark about it. They wouldn’t have found this difficult because Nana, the only family member your Mom had any contact with, lived in Reno and socialized with no one except her next-door neighbor, fifteen years her senior and senile.
Sexual orientation becomes important on my side of the story, because I could not have lived with them or had an affair with your mother had the Bennetts lived as a heterosexual couple. They were not swingers, and even if they were, I had no one to bring to the party. Bisexual relationships come in infinite varieties, and the Bennetts’ always appeared to be one of mutual exclusivity, meaning when Brent spent the night with a man, Daphne stayed out of the room and vice versa. These rules of engagement sanctioned the “open” marriage between them, in which fidelity did not stand as the irreversible deal breaker that it does in more traditional unions.
Daphne said once, in the early months of our year together, that everyone is bisexual. Some of us take it for a test drive while others leave the Maserati in the lot, and that’s fine because that second guy is me, leaving his untouched sports car to gather dust and cobwebs until the battery dies and I’m too old to drive anymore. I’ve never been an adventurous sort.
The worst moment of that year, for me, came when you and I sat alone in the little kitchen nook in your Nana’s apartment, with its mallard wallpaper and smudgy paintings of wharfs in that Currier & Ives style that always reminds me of deli mustard that’s dried to a crust. We’d only been visiting you for forty minutes – Daphne, Brent and I – but the Bennetts had already headed to the balcony to finish the blunt they started in the car. And the last words between the three of us had long since passed.
Brent especially seemed reluctant to leave me alone with you and kept peering through the slider with a look that said: Nathan, you can leave anytime you want. You were precocious enough to communicate your preferences pretty clearly at two years old, and that’s what made him nervous. You could hold a conversation. Transformers over Muppet Babies. Crunch Berries over Coco Puffs. But I didn’t reveal to you then what Brent feared I would. I’m not sure you would have understood anyway, precocious or not.
Your Nana attended the Chicken Marsala on the stovetop, her back to us, and the scent of sautéed wine and mushrooms assaulted my half-baked mind as you opened the heart-shaped locket around your neck and pointed to the picture inside. You said: “This Mommy and Daddy.” Nana glanced back, her fingertips crumbling oregano over the pot, and the dark look on her face had nothing to do with me and everything to do with Daphne and Brent leaving you for the open air of the balcony. To her, it must have appeared dismissive, as if you were an amusement whose novelty had just grown stale, and that would have aged her a bit faster than most days.
I’m still not sure what made me the most miserable at that moment: that Nana and I were the only ones in the room to hear you say it, the thrill in your gap-tooth smile, or that I was too much of a coward to correct you.
Brent never once interested me, not even as a friend, but I remained smitten with your mother Daphne since I left Grammar School. The Fates, determined to torture me like Prometheus pecked to pieces on the rock, scheduled nearly every one of our classes together from 7th to 11th Grade.
She said we’d never be more than friends, and those six words still bring a hot flush to my cheeks. We can be friends is the most ludicrous thing women say to men they don’t find attractive. In the history of man, has there ever been a masochist at that point who says, “Great! Let me get your number! We can play racquetball. And when we do, please tell me all about the men you are attracted to.”
But I conceded the fight and continued to fantasize about her day and night, in waking life and in my most humiliating nightmares. At school, she ignored the staring problem I had with her cleavage, her eyes, her legs, and every moment that she clenched or flirted with my handful of friends. Actually, friends might be too strong a word. The handful of guys I followed around.
Fantasize isn’t a big enough word because I had an entire lifetime planned out with Daphne. One that started with her pivotal moment of revelation, when she would finally reciprocate my obsession. As I lay in bed at fifteen, staring up at the faded glow-stars my Dad stuck to my ceiling when I was nine, I envisioned the evening when the voluptuous Daphne Bennett saw through Nate Bentley’s angular, shallow-chested exterior and into the brilliance of the lyrical troubadour within. C’est L’amour. And it can be as absurd as you want it to when it stays in your own mind.
She would show up at my front door, her hair heavy and darkened by an unexpected rain, her strong piano hands cold and damp as she cups my chin on her entrance. For this version of Daphne, and I had conceived many, the chin-cupping was how she signaled to everyone that she had lost interest in that guy and had moved on to this guy. In the fantasy, I had just become this guy.
She mumbles some explanation about how she felt just a bit too buzzed to drive all the way home from the party (it doesn’t matter where the party is because I wouldn’t have been invited), and she recognized my house from her piano lessons. I should footnote here that this part is actually plausible. A smidgen of truth can enhance any fantasy. A handful of spice tossed in to your spaghetti sauce.
As a toddler, your Mom took these lessons from my live-in Nanny. My own mother allowed the Nanny to give lessons with the Baby Grand on our estate, to supplement her income, and I watched your Mom from between the bars of the stair railing, even back then, when we were both knee-high.
As I grab a towel for her wet hair, thanking God my parents are in Cleveland for a Bar Mitzvah, her dripping hourglass form, rainwater glistening under the chandelier, moves to my open Mead spiral notebook on the table, next to my acoustic guitar.
“Did you write this?” she asks upon my return, cupping the book against the shelf of her breasts.
“Yeah, it’s just a bunch of songs.”
“It’s about me,” she mutters, wide-eyed, only half a question, and when I nod, that seals her revelation. Cue the Top Gun sequence. All of a sudden Charlie is chasing Maverick and she just doesn’t want anyone else to know that she’s fallen for him. And that’s okay. Our lifelong romance begins as her rain-soaked jacket and sports-top slop onto the kitchen tile.
That was my favorite fantasy. And I had many. No experience with Daphne ever came close to the ecstasy of that dream sequence and I don’t begrudge her that. No one on Earth can ever eclipse the fantasy you’ve created about them.
But what made Daphne so alluring, to me and every guy I knew, was that she didn’t want to be anyone’s fantasy. At least that’s the way she seemed to me in high school. I only saw make up on her at Halloween, and she changed out of her dusty Adidas only for Winter Formal and Prom.
In the 80’s movies I saw growing up – Some Kind of Wonderful, Pretty in Pink – the popular kids were always the rich ones. I couldn’t reconcile this with my reality. A paradigm of the adult world’s elite transferring status to their children in the classroom. In these films, the prettiest girls were always the wealthiest as if beauties could not be born from poor people – and in the rare case that they were, they lacked the necessary funds to dress like and therefore socialize with rich beauties.
Nearly all the sports-coat wearing boys rich girls slept with were doe-eyed, soft and skinny. When these guys pursued girls from poor families, no matter how charming or beautiful the girls were, they called it “slumming.” And like the moronic rationale of the star-bellied sneetch, everyone at their high school simply assumes and accepts that their parents’ financial status makes them better than ordinary mortals.
Even at fifteen, I watched these films asking: Where in the world are these high schools supposed to be? Because it certainly didn’t apply to my teenage world. Money did not buy status, and while Daphne had friends with money and friends as poor as she was, none of them would ever consider the taboo of flaunting their privileged life. At Capo High, the rich kids were the most insecure, always afraid of being exploited, always afraid that the Friday night crowd would show up at their estate not because they were adored, but because they had the widest square footage.
Girls at Capo didn’t respond to privilege or wealth or shiny cars and they didn’t want to be pampered. They respected guys who came from adversity and struggle. And not a single girl at Capo thought that nerds were cool. Nerds were boys who looked like they would likely remain boys forever because that’s how their Moms preferred it. All four years there seemed to be this unspoken but pervasive consensus that nerds – in the Beach Cities they used euphemisms like kook - were contemptibly underdeveloped – a throwback in evolution. They looked sticky and bendable and not anything worth touching.
That wasn’t just whiny paranoia, either. At Capo it often felt like policy. I had girls – not Daphne – but girls I asked on a date, insinuate this sentiment to my face, their faces pinched with revulsion. Not all girls held such contempt – some were like Daphne and treated outsiders with a magnanimous pity. But most of the time, the social dynamics at Capo High in the early 90’s often reminded me of Ancient Sparta.
I know my experience would have been much different if I went to private school, but my Dad said time and again that private schools would “cocoon” me in a world without challenges.
The real Daphne moved to San Diego the summer before our senior year, when your grandparents divorced and your Nana raised her only daughter by getting a second job in the graveyard shift – monitoring people in Mississippi on electronic house arrest.
As Daphne put it: “My senior year, my Mom and I passed each other on the stairs, and that was about it.” For an immensely popular girl like Daphne, your Nana’s absence – she came home only six hours a day, to sleep - gave her an eagerly anticipated freedom, and because she turned eighteen just two months into her senior year, she could call herself out sick from school whenever she wanted. She did so at least once a week.
I heard all this two years after the fact, of course. She had long left Capo High, where she had tortured me with her presence from Freshman to Junior year. In some ways, I found as much relief as I did misery in her absence from the halls, because by 11th grade, as we became estranged by our shifting social circles (mine diminishing as hers expanded) my staring problem had become far more acute, more distant, and hence, far more embarrassing.
Two years after high school graduation, I was living in the dorm at Berkeley with the other trust fund babies, zero interest in my Sociology major, and a roommate who only took off his headphones to remind me about my turn to take out the trash, which always stank of fly-blown guacamole because the guy did a late-snack run to Rigoberto’s every single night.
When Daphne called – the phone number in her yearbook led to my parents, who led her to the dorm – and I recognized her voice, I drew concentric circles into my desktop calendar until I carved through it from June to November and pinched my brittle chin whiskers so hard it gave me a rash.
With eight days left before Summer Break and no other plans but to go back home and resume my seasonal golf lessons with the folks, I accepted her invitation to visit her on Coronado Island, when I could muster enough air to respond.
We covered every topic of post-adolescent life that night on the phone, except the fact that she’d married Brent. Don’t ask, don’t tell. She didn’t want me to know until I flew south, and there was no way I was going to ask who she was dating and shatter my grand delusions.
On the plane ride I treated myself to Business Class and in my recliner soon became obsessed with sucking in my gut, which had grown considerably as my metabolism diminished since graduation. Daphne awaited me, alone, at the Orange Julius in the terminal.
That description isn’t worthy of such a pivotal moment so let’s try again. Daphne Bennett, who had occupied my mind’s eye every day since I was twelve, was waiting for me, alone, under the J in Julius, wearing her white smile, a drawstring psychedelic pouch and one of those striped Tijuana ponchos everybody trashed at the turn of the millennium.
She greeted me with an embrace that felt strong as a sack from a linebacker, the fingertips of her piano hands digging into my love handles, her breasts girdled under my heaving diaphragm. And with her head against my chest, I watched her eyes close.
Mine did as well, and when I looked again at the terminal, the Mcdonald’s sign had morphed into a blurry yellow caterpillar. The line between fantasy and reality, for one critical moment, had just gone hazy.
Is it strange that I felt relieved and not disappointed that your mother had gained twenty pounds herself? Not just because I could immediately release the tension in my gut. Not because every step Daphne took away from perfection felt like a step towards attainable for me. Somehow, appearing human and not as a manifested goddess made the moment more real. This was my life. This was happening. Even if it never got better than this, it was happening.
As we left the airport, Daphne cracked her Camry’s driver-side window and retrieved from the ash tray a joint wrapped in cigar leaves. Before cannabis was legal this was called a blunt, and I don’t think that’s changed, but as I said, I’m just as out of the loop now as I was then.
She pumped the lighter, lit it up, then took a long drag and passed it, saying, “So, we got a condo ‘cross from the military base. We can do jet-skis in the morning.”
That second ‘we’ was transcendent for a guy who lives out most of his life in his imagination. Daphne in a bikini, arms around my waist from behind on the backseat of a Wave Runner as I revved the throttle. That first ‘we,’ however, sounded ominous.
“‘We?’”
Her lip curled and she inhaled deep, as if this would be a long answer. Then she glanced over at the burning blunt in my hand, which I was scowling at as if it were a big brown turd. Prompting me.
This blunt began my experience with drugs. Not because I abstained from them or had any will power. Will power? Me? If Daphne had said, “We can climb into the shower together when we get back to the condo, but first I want to play chicken with the oncoming traffic,” I would have nodded and smiled. If she’d said she had a body in the trunk, and I could spend a single night with her if I helped dispose of it, I would have offered to do the digging. As far as drugs go, I hadn’t done it before simply because no one had offered, and I certainly didn’t hang out with anybody who sold it.
Modeling Daphne, I took a deep drag, held it, then lapsed into a fifteen second coughing convulsion. On TV this real-life cliché is sometimes met with uproarious laughter, but it’s really not that funny. Daphne responded by lowering the window further and cranking up the volume on Marilyn Manson, as if coughing killed her high.
We reached the highway loops that cross over into Coronado Island. The lights on the overpass blurred together until I blinked, then one of them transformed into the illuminated face of Roman emperor Caligula, a face carved marble – an orb which grew a serpent’s tail and weaved its way up into the night sky, growing larger with every slithery movement, which I followed from the window to the windshield.
Caligula’s orb centered above us in the sky and his tail snapped off like a withered foreskin. He needed it only to travel here, for this was his place, an upgraded moon eclipsing the sun.
Back in the car, the song’s dark and prophetic lyrics coincided with the global transformation above us. Prick your finger, it is done. The moon has now eclipsed the sun. Angel has spread its wings. The time has come for bitter things.
Caligula’s face yawned within the gigantic sun orb, his jaws stretching past the python point, and as they snapped the orb exploded, raining green. It reminded me of a Nickelodeon program I saw as a kid, one in which they dumped green slime on the kids.
“You Can’t Do That On Television.”
Daphne turned her sleepy, slow eyes with a smirk. “What’s that?”
I grimaced at the windshield. “You’re not gonna hit the wipers?”
She took the blunt from my hand. “Are you okay?”
I pressed the meat of my palm into one eye. “Yeah, I just...didn’t expect to see things that aren’t there.”
“It’s dusted. You’ll get used to it. What I said before, about ‘we’...it’s an open marriage. You’ll have to get used to that, too.”
My thoughts still cloudy, at the time all I understood was that Daphne was talking about marriage and I was the only one in the car. “Okay.”
She pulled into her spot under a palm tree in front of a beige condo with a bamboo trim. Slightly cheesy island theme. Then she leaned in close, setting her tan forearm with its strawberry blonde hairs on the middle console, and the blunt back in the ash tray. “You ever get nostalgic?”
I could smell lavender in her hair, mango on her freckled skin, appreciating for a moment that unlike fantasy, reality includes all of the five senses. “All the time. In fact, I think more about the past than the future.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem. Some people think living in the past keeps you from achieving your goals. But it’s the past, and only the past, that defines us. Past thoughts and past regrets. Everything else is imagination. A future that doesn’t exist outside of your own mind. Because the future never arrives exactly as you pictured it, does it? And someday, all of that will be over, too.”
“All that what?”
“You know what. Lights out. All your remembering and all your imagining. It won’t exist anymore. Because you won’t exist. And you won’t even be around to know that you don’t exist. You won’t be able to think about it.”
Like most infatuations, the one I had with your mother transformed everything she said into profound gospel, but I was soon to discover this past / future paradigm, philosophy, whatever it was, justified her (and eventually our) stagnation.
“I was looking for the humidifier in the attic,” Daphne continued. “And I found my stack of yearbooks. 7th to 11th grade. Did you know our class pictures are side by side every time – every book?”
I cut the air into sections with one hand. “Bennett. Bentley.”
Daphne flashed me her fence of white teeth. “I don’t think there is a last name in the alphabet between us. I laid those yearbooks out, chronologically, side by side, and watched us grow up together.”
“We didn’t grow up together.”
“No.” Daphne worked a bit of the cigar leaf from behind her teeth and spat it into the well of the passenger seat. “You remember what I said when you asked me to the 8th grade dance?”
“I think you know that I remember everything you ever said to me. So why don’t you just tell me.”
“We will never be more than friends.”
“Yeah.”
She retrieved the blunt, relit it. “That was cruel. I remember your face.” She puffed twice then drew deep. “You know what?” Daphne hiccupped with a mouth full of beige smoke. I leaned in close when she curled her index finger and flinched a little when she wrapped one of her long hands around the nape of my neck. Her mouth barely cracked open. “I lied,” she croaked.
Then she pressed her full lips against mine and exhaled. With my greatest will I managed not to cough again, held together only by the desire that she keep her mouth there.
That’s as good as it every got. No jet skis the next day or the day after, or ever in the year I lived at the condo with Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. Drugs, every hour on the hour, have a way of stagnating plans until they’re forgotten. But I certainly have no right to bitch about it. The drugs enhanced, or exacerbated, depending on what year you ask me, the dream-like experience of living with a woman I’d previously known best when I was alone in a room.
I know you must not have many memories of Daphne. I accompanied she and Brent on only one of the visits they made to you at Nana’s apartment, and Daphne told me she’d gone to see you only once before. I do know that Daphne and Brent O.D.’d eight months apart, and that they both died before you were three.
I wish like hell I could give you a happier story. One about how I always gave Brent shit about cooking the burgers too long on the barbecue until they tasted like hockey pucks. Or how the monkeys in India jumped on Daphne’s back when we all went white water rafting on the Dandeli River. But none of those things could ever happen. From my first night there, from Brent’s first bored and indifferent greeting, I knew I wasn’t the first time his wife had gone “slumming” outside of their clique, with her former admirers.
The three of us together – Brent, Daphne and I – were dysfunctional at best and abusive at worst. Our relationship was based on shared addictions, which came to encompass drugs far more expensive than PCP laced blunts. But these addictions ran deeper than what we cut up and sectioned off on the mixing slab. I fed Daphne’s addiction to nostalgia, to a time when she could feel adoring and longing eyes as she walked the halls, among the slamming lockers, cursing and grunts and hoots – the cacophony between classes. And it turned out I’d been wrong. Daphne did like being the stuff of men’s fantasies.
By merely standing in the room, by kissing me when Brent was gone, by sleeping in my guest bed, she fed my addiction to the ludicrous fantasy that somehow, if I just stayed long enough, Brent would go away.
That’s how it started, anyway...
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