Divorce Blues: Pt 5

Here is another of the Polaroid/Aero Ektar images.  With the f stop opened all the way to 2.5, it is difficult to focus, for with the Speed Graphic, you have to focus, then close the shutter and load the film and shoot.  In that long minute, the subject may move slightly or the camera might be jarred by putting in the film holder.  You can see here that the subject's right ear and hair is in focus, but his eyes are not.  That is how small the depth of field is with this camera.  I should probably lose about fifty percent of what I shoot like this to focus problems.  But when it works. . . ooo la la.  C'est la vie.

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The next month was full of numb agony.  At first, I needed help all the time.  Someone had to walk the dog.  Twice a day.  It wasn't easy since she was diabetic and had to have an insulin shot at eight o'clock in the morning and eight o'clock at night.  Then she walked for twenty minutes and then had a meal.  But walking was difficult because the diabetes had given her cataracts, and she was blind.  She walked with me without a leash and had gotten good at listening to my feet and my words.  She knew the route and knew what to expect.  She knew when curbs were coming and I would stomp my foot where she had to step up or down.  If you saw us, you would not know she couldn't see.  But most of the way was flat and she felt confident with me.  I was a good person, I told myself.  I had to tell myself for there was no one else to tell me.  The dog took it all for granted.

There was that and there was work.  And after work, I'd get on the couch and put my foot up on a pillow.  Then I'd either read and drink or watch a movie and drink.  I was reading the wrong books and watching the wrong movies, too.  I was on a steady diet of Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski, and to top it off, I'd rented the hours and hours of Charles Bukowski interviews that Barbet Schroeder made during the time he was working on "Barfly."  I don't know why, but it made me feel better.  Still, I knew, it was probably a mistake.

Eventually, I could hobble around a bit.  My toe was still swollen but the bones were mending.  Sixty days, they said, before the bone fragments would be knitted together again.  Until then, I wasn't to put any pressure on it.  And so after a few weeks of lying on the couch, I began to limp around putting the weight on the outside of my foot, lifting my toe off the ground.  I had gotten pretty good at it.

My friend Brando was a travel guide, and he was having one of the big parties he threw to promote his business.  He would buy beer and wine and show slides from previous trips, but it was the tales he told you while you sat in the dark listening to low music and looking at images that got you.  Truly, he didn't sell trips to exotic places.  You could do that on your own.  No, he sold close calls, near mishaps, and bad behavior.

"Many of you may know the woman in this slide, Sandy Fox.  She went with us last year to Peru.  This is her dancing in a locals cumbia bar in Cuzco.  She'd fallen for one of the guides on our rafting trip and got drunk on pisco.  She danced so long in her bare feet that they were literally bleeding at the end of the evening.  She passed out and Joe Rusco and I had to carry her back to the hotel and clean her feet up before we put her to bed.  She's a hell of a girl.  It was great having her along."

People would be pulling out their checkbooks to put down a payment to insure their spot on the next trip before the slideshow was done.  Brando was my personal devil.

So on a Saturday night, I limped into the party, my first outing since my wife had left.  I hadn't suspected how horrible it would be.  The first part wasn't so bad, the part where people asked me what had happened to me, because they were asking about my toe.  It was the other, the part where they asked me where my wife was tonight, that was terrible.  For some reason, I felt both embarrassed and ashamed.  No one knows how to respond when you say, "Oh. . . we're not together any more."  They say, "I'm sorry," of course.  The worst is when they ask, "What happened?"  How the hell do you answer that?  I was finding it hard to be heroic.

And so I found a corner window seat and drank some wine and chatted a bit with those around me watching the crowd of travelers swapping tales about their last or next adventures.   There I was, misshapen and deformed, a physical and emotional cripple, vulnerable to whatever dangers might pass.

And that is when I met Mavis.