April 13th was the fifth anniversary of the last time I set foot in the United States. Five years ago, in the wee hours of the morning, I found myself lying in the road amidst broken glass near the junction of Imperial and Fourteenth, in the crack district of San Diego, California. A large puddle of dark red liquid was spreading beneath me, and the same liquid was bubbling out of my mouth by the time Forrest, my then partner, approached me. However, I was not dying, and nor was I grievously injured. “Don’t try to move!” he told me in a panic. He didn’t know what to do. He was very cross when I finally stood up and he spotted the telltale bottle lying nearby. “Ketchup!” he exclaimed in disgust.
You may ask: what on earth would compel a seemingly sane and intelligent young woman to pull a stunt like that, to the point of filling her mouth with ketchup to be ‘coughed up’ as an extra realistic touch? Well, by that point I’d reached my tether with regard to Forrest’s crack addiction and, having gone through all the motions – the anger, the pleading, the reasoning, the guilt-tripping - it was my attempt to shake him up a bit, to try and bring across the message that he was playing with his life and possibly with the lives of those who cared for him.
Ironically, I actually didn’t feel at all concerned for my own personal safety because at that point in my life I still felt immortal, protected by the cloak of fury I wore every night when I stalked the dark streets in search on him. The reason I gave myself at the time was that although Forrest’s health withstood almost twenty years of excesses, something finally had to give, and if I happened to be nearby when he had a heart attack or suffered respiratory failure due to his crack use, I’d at least have the presence of mind to perform CPR and try to get him to a hospital, unlike his cronies, who’d just rifle through his pockets and leave him for dead. I couldn’t rest peacefully, knowing that a loved one was out there somewhere on the mean night streets of San Diego, harming himself, and I had to do something, anything, even if it involved lathering myself with a condiment and playing dead. In hindsight, it was probably all a manifestation of my need for control and my past tendency to accept responsibility for other people’s actions and circumstances out of my control in order to beat myself up endlessly for the inevitable failures.
“You can’t save me!” Forrest yelled during one of our many rows. At that point, after weeks and weeks of sleepless nights, exhaustion, pleading, cajoling and impotent anger, I was finally beginning to accept that I may not be able to drag another human being out of the quagmire of his addiction through the sheer force of my will. It was up to him.
“No, but you can save yourself.”
He didn’t like my going after him because he was more concerned for my safety than I was. I had one semi-hairy incident when one time, walking along a deserted and poorly lit night street, I noticed a large dark SUV creeping behind me with no headlights on. I stopped. The car stopped. I turned a corner. It turned a corner. At one point, the driver – a diminutive latino – got out and said: “I’m not following you, I promise.” Yeeees. In spite of his assurances, the car seemed to be tracking my movements very accurately indeed until we got to Market Street. I popped into the 7/11 and he parked across the street. I had two choices: to try to stay in the 7/11 until morning, which wouldn’t have worked if he had a gun and wanted to force me into his car at gunpoint, or to make a dash for it. I waited until the driver came into the 7/11 and then sprinted the five blocks separating me from our apartment and safety. What a rush!
On another occasion, when offered some crack by a young black guy, I told him that I didn’t have enough money. “You ain’t got five bucks?”
“It starts with five bucks, and then it takes your life. You know that.” He didn’t dispute that.
Forrest was absolutely furious with me over the ketchup incident because even though it’s not saying much, he actually cared about me as much as he could care about anyone. It also very nearly cost us our residence in that apartment block: in the morning, we got a letter under the door, telling us to leave by the following day. It took all my charm and all my grovelling skills to persuade the man in charge, an ex- Marine with little tolerance for drama, that it was all a stupid prank on my part. “I run a tight ship,” he told me. “I ain’t got time for troublemakers.” I told him that the receptionist got it wrong: that I came back in the wee hours covered in ketchup, not blood. I showed him that I was unscathed and offered to fetch the ketchup-soaked T-shirt. “You wouldn’t be dipping it in ketchup for my benefit, would you?” I assured him that I would not. Finally, I milked my Britishness for all it was worth when it turned out that the manager was a fan of “Faulty Towers”, doing my best Manuel impression until he relented with a hint of a smile.
It should have ended there, but it didn’t, which begs the question: why did I persevere with this trans-Atlantic relationship for another couple of years, even after being banned from the States - worrying about Forrest, calling him, arranging to meet up with him in the dreary Mexican border city of Tijuana at great personal expense before finally coming to a peaceful realisation two years ago that it was completely and irreversibly over? Why did this man, with whom I ultimately had little in common, end up playing such a major role in my life?
Harun al-Rashid* told me once that I treat my life as play in which I’m the star, and if I find that things are getting boring, I do something suitably wacky to liven things up. That used to be true, and I did thrive on drama, on the extreme highs and lows. If my life didn’t have angst in it, it just wasn’t complete. My entanglement with Forrest certainly appealed to my sense of drama. We met by chance, when I wandered into a barbershop on Broadway, San Diego, in the summer 2001, to get a haircut, and ended up staying in San Diego for several days longer than planned. So many variables: if I’d decided to have my hair cut on a different day, or by a different person, or if I hadn’t accepted Forrest’s dinner invitation – my life might have worked out very differently. I may not have met my death row friends, or worked in Ukraine, or been banned from the States – since all this stemmed from a chance fling many years ago.
Perhaps I should never have tried to turn this fling into something grander than it was, but I did, and for six years, it gave me focus and purpose, as I paid my annual visit to the States and then to Mexico. I realise now that I loved the idea of crossing the world for love, without stopping to ask myself if that’s what it was. Plus, I once found him very attractive, before crack weathered his handsome features. When I met him, he asked me how old I was (presumably to check if I were legal given my youthful appearance) and told me his age. I was a couple of weeks short of twenty; he was fifty. It gave me a few seconds’ pause, since I thought he was in his early forties, but in the end decided that it made no difference. On the spot, I made up the ‘guideline’ that I’ve abided by up till now: it’s okay as long as the man in question is no older than my parents. That gives me a nice 35-year margin to play with.
There’s no question that I really cared about Forrest, but I also suffered from white-knight-in-shining-armour-itis, wanting to rescue damsels (or crack-addicted barbers) in distress. When in 2004, I arrived in San Diego, not knowing whether I’d find him since we’d fallen out the previous year, within two hours I knew that he was doing time for drug possession at the Otay Mesa County Jail out of town (in the States, addiction still largely counts as a crime, rather than a disease), and I’d booked a time to see him for the following week, before returning to San Francisco. My play even had a sountdtrack: when the Greyhound bus was flying through the night to San Diego the following week, I had “Holding Out For A Hero” playing on a loop. Then came the euphoria of the reunion, followed by his calling me upon his release, and our long heartfelt conversations during the brief period of time when he was clean, and living in a church-run halfway house. Then when I came to stay with him in 2005, his sobriety lasted exactly one day. I was slow on the uptake because I was in denial about the extent of his addiction and also because I then still believed in ‘positive conditioning’ – that if you nurture and encourage the best in someone, it will flourish, just as negative conditioning can reduce someone to whatever other people say they are. Maybe positive conditioning does work, but the subject has to be receptive.
I was asked recently: “Why do you think you used to go for the men that you did?” and I responded that perhaps since I have a bad relationship with my father – a traumatised man unable to get emotionally close to anyone, and couldn’t fix that, I tried to ‘fix’ other traumatised men, though it's not as simple as that. Another reason is my being drawn to the dark side of humanity – psychological problems, emotional frailty, addiction. I want to know what makes people tick, though treating my lovers as interesting psychological cases is probably not the way to build a healthy relationship.
I certainly found Forrest interesting for as long as I wanted to get to the root of his trauma or perhaps I projected onto him the qualities I wanted him to possess. One of eleven children, he grew up in relative poverty, beaten regularly by his father, dodged the draft when the Vietnam war came about, worked as an engineer in Iran until the Americans got kicked out in '79, was married twice, then turned to drugs in his early forties when the second marriage broke up, and was on the run from the law the last time I spoke to him, having dodged an order to enter rehab in California and having fled to Vegas. He’d been running all his life, and I suppose it’s quite fitting that a psychologically traumatised and emotionally unavailable man should get involved with me – someone who’s also been emotionally ‘on the run’ for years and who used to be so terrified of real emotional involvement that going for men unable to ‘threaten’ me with such seemed like the ideal solution. We certainly made quite a pair!
We tend to gravitate towards people we instinctively feel an emotional resonance with, and I must’ve felt a connection with him. My relationship with Forrest came to an end for several reasons: we could no longer see each other, because while I could see him across the border in Mexico, as of 2007, US citizens can no longer cross land borders without a passport and a fugitive from the law can’t get one. I also came to see that my ‘enabling’ did more harm than good; that by trying to protect Forrest from himself and from the consequences of his actions I prevented him from hitting rock bottom and making the decision to sort himself out. Finally, once my emotional patterns changed, he was no longer what I wanted or needed.
Okay, so the above explains why I was attracted to Forrest. But what about other characters – Pantera, Bill on death row, Ed the Nudist…?
To be continued….
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