Coming Through Slaughter

                                                                 

I have never seen anyone exploit the death of a relationship quite like Josephine Gillis. Jo outdoes the best in the field. I thought I had come across some outstanding revisionist history with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and his tragic, impressionistic novel Coming Through Slaughter, the fictionalized retelling of the story of Buddy Bolden, an early New Orleans jazz pioneer who lost his talent, and everything else in his life, to insanity.

What is remarkable about Coming Through Slaughter is the fragmented, free flowing, and ever-changing tone of the narrative. In telling Bolden’s compelling and heartbreaking story, Ondaatje reaches for a style that attempts to emulate, on paper, the syncopations of jazz. He succeeds, in my opinion, better than Kerouac ever did.

Ondaatje captures something in Slaughter — a preoccupation in his work, incidentally — that is haunting, disturbing, and beautiful all at the same time. It is the concept that every individual human life is unique and there is more than “one story” to any life history. Life is a complex mosaic, one person sees you that way, another views you another way. If asked to reflect upon a friend’s passing, one person may say you were a sinner while another labels you as a saint.

All of which brings us back to the point, back to Josephine Gillis’s remarkable work of revisionist history at 10086 Sunset Boulevard. From October 2005 to the present day I have played a key role in Jo’s attempts to rewrite her personal history for public consumption. A role I have been cast in against my will and I have not spoken out about. Until now.

Jo and I were together for a good many years. Jo and I separated for the final time in late 2005, after a brief reconciliation that had its moments of tension as I illustrated in a flash fiction piece for 8763 Wonderland called Rain and Poetry:

“It’s raining.”

“Yep.”

“Read me a poem.”

“What?”

“I want to get all comfy-cozy in bed under the sheets and listen to you read me a poem.”

“Umm – okay. Let me just get into my robe and then I need to do a last e-mail check and put the cell phone on charge and –”

“Jesus. Forget I said anything. You fucking ruin it every time.”

“Ruin what?”

“I asked you to read me a poem.”

“And I said I would –”

“—after. After you do this and do that and probably have one last cigarette and another shot of whatever you’re drinking. Go do what you’ve got to do. I’m going to sleep.”

“Goddamnit, Joanne. Fine. Don’t go to sleep. I’ll read you a fucking poem, for shit sake. Which one? From which book?”

“Forget it. I don’t want to put you out.”

“Do you have any idea what kind of a day I had today? I do not need this shit from you right now, Joanne. It looks like the studio is going to change their mind about the script so you can just forget that Malibu summer beach house for now, honey. Pipe dream.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I said, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You haven’t said anything until now.”

“Because you didn’t fucking ask. All you were interested in was some goddamn poem.”

Yes, there was another woman involved in my break-up with Jo. I also wrote about this in a less-fictional form in September 2005 with a Wonderland posting aptly titled Wallowing in My Gaping Character Flaws.

It’s all behind me now.

Josephine halted all communication with me in December 2006. She even blocked my ISP from posting comments at 10086 Sunset Boulevard, a site that I had a major hand in creating. But it never became what it was supposed to be. Instead, Jo took the site in a new direction, wrapping herself up in the morbid shell of a woman scorned. In a passage at Sunset she once referred to herself as “a dangerous time bomb full of raging hormones, bitter disappointment and shattered dreams.”

Today I curiously sauntered over to 10086 Sunset Boulevard to have a look-see. The site has been redesigned. Good. But Josephine, who used the scorned woman routine, she asserts, to shed unwanted pounds and attain a new, more radiant viewpoint on life is still spinning a revisionist’s tale of events. A new posting at the redesigned site, an introduction to Jo’s “Story So Far”, titled The Road To Sunset, is deserving of some commentary from one of the Ondaatje-like characters who was a witness to events essayed and who has a completely different perspective.

Let’s begin. Josephine writes:

 10086SunsetBoulevard.com was started in the fall of 2005, just after I experienced a couple of life changing events. The nutshell version is this; while I was away from my home in Los Angeles on a visit with my family to help scatter my Dad’s ashes, the man I had been with for seven years, moved a woman into our home and sent me an email telling me not to bother coming back.

This is sort of a new spin on things. Now I am being cast as the evil bastard who dumped the poor grieving waif while she was out performing some sacred ceremonial duty. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jo’s mother, a very upright and uptight British national with a snide mean streak that gnaws at Jo’s insides, simply could not care for her husband as he lay dying from cancer. She tried, bless her, but she just couldn’t do it, preferring to have Jo around to do her bidding and shopping and everything else for her. The problem is Jo and I were living in L.A. Jo’s parents were up in Northern California. Despite the fact that Jo’s wonderful brother and sister-in-law, who live much closer to Mum than we did, offered to step in and help in any and every way they could, Jo would still run to the airport the moment Mum phoned and ordered “Come!” And it was motivated by more than an obligation to her ailing father (whom I loved dearly) but we will explore that in a moment.

After her father’s passing, Jo’s mother continued to insist on Jo’s presence in her home. She was completely incapable of taking care of herself and she would accept no one else but Jo to do everything for her. It wasn’t just the grieving process. Jo’s mother was a co-dependent all of her life and incapable of pesky things like driving or making the right choice where an important decision is concerned.

Jo and I were trying to create a new life for ourselves in L.A.  But Jo’s frequent comings and goings, always at her mother’s insistence, were putting a great strain on the relationship. Here I was, alone in a residential hotel in Glendale, on disability and suffering from another flare-up of severe psoriasis which made it difficult for me to walk or use my hands effectively, and Jo, when asked directly to choose between returning home and helping to take care of me or staying in Northern California and caring for a selfish woman who could have fended for herself if she had even tried, had to opt for dear old Mum.

There’s backstory on this wicked co-dependence between mother and daughter but, as I said, more on that when it’s relevance arises. And as far as the ash-scattering is concerned, that is an event that happened rather matter-of-factly, without a great degree of ceremony or planning, during one of Jo’s many trips to the Bay Area. In other words, she never booked a flight and hopped a plane with the specific intent of sending Dad’s mortal remains to the four winds on the runway of Travis Air Force Base.

In the second paragraph of “The Road To Sunset”, Jo pens:

When I read through my story, I’d like to remove all of those postings from the archives of the website or subject it all to revisionist history. I may add footnotes at some point, you know like “what the hell was I thinking?”, but I will leave the story up, because I still get e-mails from people who have stumbled upon my story and have been helped by it and even made better decisions when it came to their revenge plans.

“Their revenge plans”. Yeah, that’s part of the niche market that Jo cynically hoped to trap at 10086 Sunset Boulevard. She was planning to exploit the sliver market with a Scorned Woman Cookbook — this is the book she is always making references to someday writing —  a collection of the recipes that helped her lose weight in order to wreak … revenge? How is this revenge? I’ll tell you how in the way Jo’s mind works. It goes something like this: “I’ll show you! I’ll slim down, get myself lookin’ really hot and then you’ll be sorry we’re no longer together!”

Sorry. I’m not that base. And why the simmering thirst for revenge?. I haven’t conducted a search for that keyword on Jo’s site but I’m certain it must appear dozens of times. But, hey, I’m glad that the site I helped launch aided women the world over in sorting through their “revenge plans.” Jesus, who needs Lorena Bobbitt, right?

Jo continues:

I looked for help when I was at the worst of my heartbreak, but found mostly bitter, scorned women, still talking about the event years and years after it happened. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like, if I didn’t let go of the painful feelings and the sting of betrayal. It wouldn’t have been a life worth living.

Memo to Jo Gillis: Check a calendar. This is January 2008. You are clearly still bitter and “still talking about the event years and years after it happened.” I’m just sayin’.

And then, the only other graph I’m going to comment upon is as follows:

Concentrating on pulling my own life back together, losing weight and recovering became my obsession. I was fat, broke and almost 50 when this happened. These weren’t the best odds to work with, but work with them I did. I wanted to heal and not remain scorned and bitter. I wanted to lose weight and I did. I feel shallow to tell you that the euphoria of fitting into a pair of jeans that hadn’t fit in years almost seemed to mend my broken heart.

Here’s where the co-dependence with Mum weaves its way back into the fabric of Jo’s tattered life. Jo, in my opinion, was never “fat”. A few pounds overweight, sure. Due to a sedentary lifestyle. Little to no exercise and lots of caloric intake. And why not? She didn’t have anything better to do than watch TV and graze through a couple of candy bars and a bag of chips because Jo Gillis did not work for a living for most of the years we were together, particularly the last three years. It was up to me, the guy who was on disability and not supposed to be working too much anyway, to bring in the bacon.

Oh, sure, I snagged Jo a few transcription jobs here and there — from clients of mine — but otherwise she brought in no income and expressed no interest in doing so despite repeated promises to the contrary. Talk about another strain in the relationship. But you won’t hear about that at 10086 Sunset Boulevard. So that’s why she was “broke” when everything fell apart. She had no visible means of support outside of myself and her mother, who would always send money when the chips were down, hence Jo’s sense of obligation to run to Mum when she yelled “Jump!” because it was easier to carry on that twisted co-dependent relationship than to get a job and join the rest of us over here in the material world where providing for one’s own creature comforts is more than just something you academically discuss as an adjunct to a conversation on Darwinism.

In the opening pages of “Coming Through Slaughter”, Ondaatje reconstructs an old black community in New Orleans of which “there is little recorded history.” There is, I am afraid to say, plenty of recorded history on the jagged rips and tears that constituted my relationship with Jo Gillis — a long history, I might add, we’d known each other since 1979 — and this offering is made to the reader with the intent of creating some balance, of presenting another perspective that has heretofore been sleeping in the shadows.

Related: “Smoke: A Trace Story”