I WAS AN ADDICT, HOOKED ON RESPONSIBILITY. I tended to take too much; gorged myself on other people's problems, strung myself out on relational benders. The Jimmy-Jakes of co-dependency kept me in orbit of the damaged, soul hemorrhaging mass of my fellow black sheep. I was their Ronin, masterless and forsaken, wandering an atomised social landscape, seeking an undiscovered country where my tribe still sauntered. My arrival had pushed Grace's buttons, dinner and a cocktail too little too late; an unintended but insulting placation for days of absence.

"Maggie is a little sister to me, for crying out loud! She looks up to me for advice! Never mind the fact that she's 15–you think I'm sleeping with a 15 year old? Does that sound like something I would do?" I tended to go in, Socratic guns blazing. Half a lifetime of defending myself against Narcissistic emotional manipulation. Like the lone survivor of too many I.E.Ds, expecting them everywhere.

"I don't know what to think! Except that she's been blowing up your phone for three days, while I hardly even see you. You know I've needed help with this opening next month and you're impenetrable; completely emotionally unavailable." Grace blocked the only entry into her kitchen, arguing from the echo of old patterns. I felt hemmed-in.

"Maggie's Dad's in hospital having open-heart surgery. She can't drive. I was helping her run errands," I pressed sea bass into the cast iron skillet, its sizzling in copycat of my inner state, "that's hardly me being emotionally unavailable."

"Running errands for three days?"

"As I said: she can't drive. She has to go back and feed her Dad's cat, bring him things from the house...She's terrified. I'm just trying to be a good friend, plus I have class, and work–"

"While leaving me in the cold–" She was violating Hanlon's razor; Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. I was a bumbling idiot, not an evil one.

"Leaving you in the–" not intentionally, I'm just shit at multitasking, "You're projecting paranoid delusions from what other men have done to you in the past onto me–" Defensive reaction induced. Shut up recommended.

"Don't you psycho analyse me–"

"Why not? You're clearly out of your mind!"

It wasn't until something snapped my face over my shoulder, and the ringing erupted in my ears that I realised she'd punched me in the face. A Left hand jab too quick to be pre meditated; the sound of the ear cells dying. I'll never hear that frequency again–G sharp? or A natural? It oscillated in my stunned right ear. I ratcheted my jaw open to speak. A second blow came, along with that brief muting of the world following an impact, a momentary blurring of vision, a flash of white like the signal noise between channel changes back in the CRT '80s. The world goes monochrome for a split second, then retinal cone-signal returns with a vengeance; spiked with adrenaline. Even the pain is in Technicolor.

I taste copper on my lips, bleeding from a light scratch under the eye. Time expands. If this was a man, I could hit back; would hit back. It would be necessary to cobble together a quick sequence for human disassembly; stealing wind with a jab to the solar plexus, a kidney shot to send a wave of cold error through the extremities. Beats in the space between exchanges, an offer of material for a counter shot, but I'm not there, his fist finding only empty space, jeopardizing balance with an over-thrown cross. My foot flat meets his knee front-on maybe popping it, the deck rushes up to meet him before he realises what happened; that despite my reserved wallflower bearing, I can dance. This was a woman who had hit me. Conventional wisdom was: never hit back, but that didn't mean I had to stand there and take it. I stopped the burners where I had been pan-searing Sea Bass for our dinner, stormed into the gemutlich den of her bedroom, snatched my weekender, shoved my things into it.

"What are you doing?" She had followed me from the 1967 museum kitchen.

"What's it look like I'm doing?" Don't make this any harder, Grace. There is an imaginary line at the door jamb, beyond which is a desperate man. Don't cross it.

"You can't leave!" I hate you! Don't leave me!

"Watch me," I tossed the words over one shoulder like a grenade; tore my things from her armoire. Brown leather weekender packed, I pushed past, dumping her house-key on the floor as I slipped through her front door for the last time. I felt hot in the shock of cold air, my temple and jaw screamed burst capillary shouts. I chucked my bag in the car, my hand shaking as I put my key into the ignition between the seats–slotting it after five agonising tries. Burning rubber in the winter snow, black ice be damned. Lonely on the dark road to nowhere; focusing on the shifting pattern. The clutch holding my attention as much as the gears, keeping me grounded in escape velocity. My adrenaline cascade receded. My breaths shortening finally alone to exclaim the inconceivable, an exasperated "what the fuck!" yawp into the frigid space of the car. I must have looked a madman refugee from some hillbilly antics. I had turned up at Grace's place while she was at work, planning to surprise her with sea bass and a bottle of Macallen 15 I'd won hustling the local Sigma Chi at billiards. A quiet dinner on knuckle sandwiches isn't exactly what I had in mind.

Violence is perfectly justifiable for the defense of or preservation of life–as a last resort. Every reasonable step should be taken to avoid it. If utilized, violence must be efficient, temperate, decisive. A man should be prepared to project a capacity for violence when necessary. Knowledge gained entirely in the field, my instructors the bad-actors of the world. The delinquent molesting my best friend behind the woodshed at school–I lost that one, he was ahead of me on the puberty curve; heavier, faster, stronger. Simple physics denied me an edge. I ended up picking sand out of my teeth for weeks while my best friend shunned me for being unable to protect her from his perversions. Years later, puberty finally caught up and I spent as much time bench pressing as I did getting the High Score at Galaga, I threw two college creeps out of my secret high school house-party for trying to rape my friend Suzie in one of our upstairs guest rooms; Metalhead Dungeon Master Zelenski and I brandishing Casey Jones golf clubs in the driveway like longswords, fully prepared to wax medieval in defense of our classmate. We gave her would-be assailants once chance to beat concrete. They chose taillights over a titanium headache.

Considering the genesis of this chivalrous behaviour, I couldn't pinpoint its conception. It seemed antithetical to the domestic mise en scène of my formative years. While my parents argued, I retreated into Middle Earth. I had been hiding in their walk-in closet large enough to fit an Aston Martin when the sliding door was struck from its hinges, the floor-to-ceiling mirrored glass cracked in the telltale starburst pattern of acute impact. My 5' 3" mother had somehow shoved my 6' 4" father into it, shattering the mirror as well as his nerves. They had no clue I was there, hiding out in one of the built-ins with Gimli and Aragorn. In the afternoon light, I emerged to the silhouette of my Dad's broad back in the shower. Through gap between dappled glass aquamarine tile, I saw blood running down the drain. Within days, they were playing the power-couple angle for their jet-setting colleagues, laughing over glasses of Cab Franc. It wasn't Grace's naked violence that shocked me, rather its ease, a casual escalation from the verbal to the visceral. That, and she was getting away with it.

I pulled into Conolly's driveway, practically tumbling out of my Hatchback. Exploding through his front door, I set the Macallen down on his kitchen bar, flanking it with two thick glencairns from his enviable teak liquor cabinet. Connolly emerged, shirt untucked and half buttoned, his auburn hair in Bobby Kennedy disheveled repose; a roach glowed between lighthouse teeth.

"Jesus, man!" He exclaimed, in that clenched way only smokers can manage, "The Hell happened to you?" He played brass, trumpet to be more precise, with lungs up to the task. At only 5' 8" he projected presence–filling the room with his New England voice.

I poured two-fingers of the Scotch each, neat. Brought him one of the glencairns then collapsed in a heap into his easy chair, the light from the table lamp warming up my impending shiner. I raised my glencairn, offering up an old Royal Navy toast.

"To wives and sweethearts! May they never meet," the last half as much into my drink as to Connolly. "Let's just say I've gone off Grace." I pulled a sip of Macallan. It bit, shifting my awareness away from my throbbing temple.

He nearly spat out the 15 year old, oak aged, single malt first sip. "She did that to you?"

"She seems to think I'm fucking Maggie."

"Are you?" He threw me a sidelong Montgomery Clift glance, "Fucking Maggie?"

"Of course not! Why does everyone think that? Just because we're close... Advice, it's what people–" Connolly raised a lone Leonard Nimoy eyebrow, calling bullshit, "–what women in my life tend to do. They see me as their rock, they lean on me for a steady presence. Sex needn't be in the equation and it isn't in this case. Need I remind you she's barely in High School?"

"What gave her the impression you and Maggie were anything but friends?"

"Beats me. She's been cheated on in the past, so frequently in fact if you could crunch the numbers you'd eventually predict the lottery. She says I've become 'emotionally unavailable,' finds it triggering. How one makes the leap to extracurricular games of 'hide the salami' I don't know, but in her mind I've committed the cardinal sin of looming infidelity," The great enemy in any relationship was doubt fueled by insecurity. At the first sign of infection it tainted everything, even the best of your partner took on distorted character. Worse still, there was no cure. In a cultural milieu when men were always two-timing bastards and women were always virginal nymphs redolent in Waterhouse sanctitude, it was only a matter of time before the amorous fruit rotted from inside out, "I have been a little preoccupied, I'll give her that."

"How so?" A telltale needle scratch of a record starting up, the hum of his 1978 pioneer sx-1980 warming the cabinets; rising eighth notes on a Cheers piano, "Changes" off of Black Sabbath's 1972 Vol. 4 studio album; apropos.

"I made the mistake of checking the mail today. Got this thick legal envelope from an Aunt I haven't seen since '96, filled with photographs and correspondence, and a cover letter making the case that I, dear old friend, am I certified bastard."

"Don't mean to be obtuse," he zipped a flame from his brass zippo, lit up a fresh fag, his words misshaped by the filter between his teeth "But even if what she's alleging is true? a) 'the fuck business is it of hers? and b) What does it have to do with you? How does one... un-bastard himself?" He clicked shut the zippo. "Changes" changed key, Ozzy's articulation better comes through when he's singing, when he was with Thelma. Sharon was the worst thing that ever happened to the poor bastard.

"In her grim imaginings I'm sure Smith and Wesson have a wide variety of solutions, in everything from .38 to .45," I sipped more Macallen, slipping gallows humor into the space between us. I had forgotten all about my bruising temple, "She says I should be disinherited. The estate should go to my cousins; it's all political since we aren't even related by blood–my Grandparents took her in when she was pregnant out of wedlock. This is some reptilian genetic gambit, a usurpation of my Mother's bloodline with her own, by Death or exile. Bloody Homeric." We sat in Ozzy Osbourne's melodious tones awhile, Connolly's cigarette burning down to the filter. He rose from the other chair, leaving my periphery for a moment before returning with the Macallan bottle, pouring out two more amber fingers.

"And you haven't told Grace any of this?" I snapped out of my reverie, I took back my glencairn, the notes of smoked peat and oak reasserting themselves in my senses.

"No." I sipped my second glass, "I've barely processed it myself, how could I tell her?"

"You could tell me."

"That's different."

"How so?" How so? Connolly was in my fraternity of choice, a solemn brotherhood of men who had seen too much. I could count on him to compute the complex terror of feminine1emotionality through an empirical filter. This was the unmysterious triage of male friendship: Assess my state, am I dangerous to myself, or others? Can I perform the functions hitherto agreed upon as the basis of the friendship? A PASS on both checks, advances one to the next stage of analysis. Here, action and reaction of a given situation is submitted to rigorous causality tests; a problem to be learned from, if it couldn't be solved. Life lived as autopsy; we tended to downplay the living part, sadly. With functional utility confirmed and solutions in hand, one could return to the field indifferent to any lingering emotions that, like hairline fractures in the gears, guaranteed future hazards to the machinery. This was where the longer-term care of female friendships came into play, here those emotional hangers-on could be parsed and put in their proper context–without fear of judgement, if there was no sexual tension involved, no performative assessments by the hypergamous filtration system that pruned the species.

Grace lived on a fervid treadmill, everything extreme on the dials. So immersed in the drama of her social circle, the happenings in my life threw 7/8 measures into the cut-time of her emotional rhythms. As far as she was concerned, my place was in her bed, not in her emotional ecosystem. When I wasn't a hard penis for her to enjoy, I mirrored her thespian ambitions. Sound and fury, signifying nothing unfolded on the stage of her imaginings; always practicing for a role. She exuded fire, biting my shoulder as we made love in the weak Winter Sun, Yin and Yang in flesh. She kept a stable of willing men in rotation for power-couple optics, ever the life of the party in the appendix of the art world in which we moved. Eyes shining, she laughed at my jokes. She was the only one who offered a solitary damn about my 16mm monochrome musings; philosophical phantasmagoria where I unpacked my history in Academy Ratio expeditions of light, motion and time. As much the black sheep in film school as I was everywhere else, I moved by different aesthetics, eras and sensibilities from my peers. My take on contemporary pop-culture: Corporate-Gnostic black magic experiments in Crowleyism, casual dabbling in nightclub narcotics; ghetto booty wardrobe malfunctions über culture dysfunctions. Soap Operas where thematic tension used to reside in narrative reverie. A miasma of hip-hop flash-bangs; glitz coated raw-sewage. I looked up to none of it, doomed myself to wander the desert of the authentic. It infuriated me that I'd missed the beatnik era by a mere 30 years. Even still, I would trip the light iconoclastic in the Beat scene with my anti-collectivist, individualist devotions. Grace sensed my longings, our precarious love-affair built on lack. Once so gentle, all Clara Bow smiles she never missed my Sibell-Wolle screenings, pre-demolition; ever in the back row, alabaster face chiaroscuro in the dancing beams of the projector. This human being, who had supported my work against the indifference of all others, had just punched me in the face. Twice.

"All packed?" His question broke the silence. We were both flying out tomorrow. I was bound for four days regrouping in London, before a rendezvous with Connolly in Switzerland for a week's skiing near Gstaad. I wondered how my shiner would go over with the civilised mien of the Swiss; confirmations of a certain dusky savagery disrupting the Gstaad Gestalt. The old cliche shook a chuckle from my nearly barren humor tree, Beg your pardon, Monsieur, but I seem to have had an unfortunate encounter with a flight of stairs... perhaps even a vase or two on the way down. I hedged on another sip, the chuckle had sent sharp pains through my face, 80 grit sandpaper on the nerves. Fuck it. I'll wear my beating loud and proud at the Chalet.

"Right, old chap. See you in Gstaad."

Back in my third floor flat above the creek, chilly in the February pre-blizzard night. It was time to start packing, stay up all night for a 4 am Super Shuttle to the airport. Finally taking a break from the North American circus, back to a place I knew and could understand. I'd left the Macallen at Conolly's as a parting gift, opting for the tea kettle instead and something to further soothe my alkaline nerves. Should I call the police? File a report? God knows I got screwed enough on taxes; the least they could do was take a report, even if it ended up mouldering in a filing cabinet somewhere. The possibility Grace could get away with assault... is that what it was? Of course that's what it was! She should have to pay some price. I saw her, in that subterrane hollow of my mind's eye, applying for a job, renewing her passport, anything where background checks were routine, those scarlet letter words, "Domestic Violence" dogging her every step along the path of social respectability. I snatched up the phone and dialed police non-emergency with quavering fingers. A solitary ring sounded before the phone clicked over to their version of the automated switchboard "You have reached the ___ county Sheriff’s Department. If this is an emergency, please hang-up and dial nine-one-one." Further clicks at the other end of the legal disclaimer, and a voice cutting in.

"Police, non-emergency," The dispatch operator a young man, around my age, a slight Okie twang dusted his speech. I cleared the tumbleweeds from my throat.

"Yes, thank you for taking my call. I'd like to report an assault." I could hear him arising in his chair on the other end, finally some action in this sleepy little white-bread town.

"One moment, while I transfer you." Yet another click, followed by the warm analog hum of an active phone line just before ringing. The officer on the other end snatched up the phone, annoyed.

"Officer Kelso," A woman's voice, early forties, stocky spiel in the vein of female Lacrosse players. I imagined a round faced brunette, grounded, direct; respected by her fellow officers. Neither one of the guys nor a woman, in the sense most men think of women. Non-sexual. Just a good police.

"Yes, officer thank you for taking my call. I have just been assaulted and would like to file a report."

"Okay..." Old school receiver, held in place between her shoulder and one cheek, her voice gave it away. There was the sense that she was rolling away from her desk, fetching fresh paperwork, "your name?"

"Corey Drayton."

"Date of birth?"

"xx/xx/1982"

"22, okay,"

"And where did this assault take place?"

"817 Beech street," She scribbled details with a medium ballpoint pen, heavy on the paper.

"Who hit you?"

"My girlfriend, Grace Anne Monroe."

"Did you say your girlfriend hit you?"

"Correct," She heaved a heavy breath, the leather of her chair creaking and she leaned back into it, something cluttered to the table–her pen.

"Mister Drayton," I bristled, only my Dad called me that, "I'm going to level with you. I can't file this report." Behind me the electric kettle simmered.

"I don't understand."

"If you press charges, I have to come out talk to you. Both of you... Oh-Pee, says if I make an arrest, I have to arrest the offender most likely to represent a threat–the bigger, stronger one. That means you."

"But she hit me. Twice–"

"I understand that."

"Not slaps across the face, mind you. She hauled off and punched me, with a closed fist, in my face," I leaned into it, "You're telling me she walks? She's getting away with domestic assault?"

"My advice to you would be don't see her again. Go home. Have somewhere else to be. I won't file this report, for your sake." I heard her lean back into her desk, imagined her her forehead in one hand, speaking low into the phone, "Trust me, I'm doing you a favour."

"Alright. Forget it."

"Good luck to you," I tossed the phone onto my kitchen table, splitting off the battery compartment as it clattered to a stop with a sharp rattle. Now I knew better than to appeal to the police for justice. Domestic Violence. The words didn't even sound like they belonged in my mind. The concept held certain connotations in the collective consciousness; I didn't see it as a gendered issue, rather a human one. Men and women were equal opportunity offenders in practice, but on paper, the Duluth model clouds the calculus, obfuscates reality. There was no way I would be believed as the hallowed victim. Even with an arm off, bleeding from the stump, they'd find some way of accusing me of amptuee privilege, gross weaponisation; Dworkin's revenge. Anyone who attends art school graduates with a bonus degree in Intersectional Critical Theory–such vivisections of modernism are as much part and parcel of education as our chosen majors. I had been naive enough to think the more paranoid reality deconstructions as theoretical experiments, safe in Academia where they could do no harm. Here was evidence to the contrary. Exhibit A: a police force unwilling to treat physical assaults as equal. Exhibit B: an officer of the law looking the other way to ensure the recipient of an assault doesn't experience further victimisation by a system fixed by activist animus. Maybe Officer Kelso was right, a shiner and a few cuts to the face wasn't something rest and a bag of ice wouldn't cure. There was naught to do but let my body run its course. About as much could be said of my inner state, which the extension exploding in my living room didn't calm, I yelped, still feeling Grace's one-two special. I lunged into the living room, snatching up the other phone, wincing, forgetting my right side was my phone side, where I was hit. Heavy breathing on the line, smoker's lungs at the summit of some distant stairwell.

"Corey? This is Bob," 1st Assistant Director with whom I had worked with on a documentary two years earlier. He said I was the best focus technician he'd ever seen, My time in film school was soon ending. There was a 50/50 chance this was social or business.

"Hi, Bob. It's good to hear from you," I forced a smile through the phone. Business associates never needed to know my business. My jaw clicked and smarted. I hoped he couldn't hear it all the way in– "How's Princeville?"

"Fine, fine. Hey look, uh–" I could feel one of his beefy, simian hands scraping a perpetually five o'clock shadowed jaw, a telltale quick beat before something awful came down the pike, "I don't know how to say this... Hunter just shot himself up in Aspen. I thought you should know, 'fore the press gets wind of it." Hunter S. Thompson, my chum and sage was no more, but I think I understood it: why surrender one's self to the tender mercies of grinding down old age in the face of a mutating milieu? Better to leave it on your own terms. Pure gonzo, right up to the end.

I awoke in the living room, to hobgoblin banging on my front door. I couldn't remember falling asleep. My head throbbed even worse. My tea had gone tepid and untouched on the coffee table, the embers of the dying fireplace reflected in the teacup's rim. I rose in the undulating glow of the TV, thankfully muted against soft soap Abu Ghraib scandals from the far side of the world. Unlatching the door with the heavy thunk of a 1950s bolt lock invoked Mannlicher Carcano degrees of casting; I swung the door open to my neighbour Erik's nordic underwear model face.

"Hey man, so sorry to wake you," the Norwegian accent would almost be American if not for its musicality.

"It's no problem–" I said waving away the awkwardness, "I have to be on a plane in two hours anyway. What's up?" Erik heaved a timid breath, I had never seen him so nervous. He was in high-altitude training for the Norwegian Olympic Ski Team. This towering kid, carved out of marble actually seemed afraid to let fly whatever was on his mind,"På Norsk?" I offered in Bokmål business Norwegian, hoping to make him more comfortable giving me the news in his native tongue, which, owing to spending part of my childhood there in the mid-nineties, I could speak with decent proficiency.

"These two assholes broke into your car. I heard glass breaking and I looked out and saw," he gesticulated, searching for the right word, "lommelykt...torches, you know?"

"Flashlights," I patted him on the shoulder, snatched my keys from the wall hook, "care to take a peek?"

Erik wasn't lying. The thieves had smashed my passenger's side window, popcorn glass littered about the cab's '79 cloth interior. They'd been surgical, popping the glovebox with a small flathead to gain access to the release for the electrical panel. From there, they had peeled back the instrument panel's Bakelite bezel like a sardine can, extracting the aftermarket stereo I had bought with tutoring money in Penfield, New York–back when playing mp3 CDs in cars was cutting edge. I considered the tangle of wiring, plastic spaghetti beyond the field of my awareness. Always covered up by the pristine bezel I had restored and detailed with my own hands from landscaping jobs. We were always oblivious to the complex machinery behind things and equally behind people. The appliances in our lives simply worked–or didn't; indistinguishable from magic, to the layman. When they failed or broke down, we brought them to the wizards and their seemingly arcane knowledge. It was the contents of the glovebox that told me everything I needed to know about the men behind this carnage: a deck of playing cards, a first-aid kit, a Swiss Army survival knife, a compass, a mini-maglight, a tyre-pressure gauge, a stack of road maps, waterproof matches. Indicia of preparation and clear thinking. They hadn't stolen anything else, and they wanted me to see it; laying out everything on the passenger's side footwell in that deliberate, postmortem manner one sees after airplane crashes; some indoor Football pitch with debris laid out in a to-scale jigsaw of chilling implications.

"What are you going to do now?" Erik asked. Through a Clint Eastwood grimace, I drew in the chill dry February air, my jaw screamed protest.

"is i magen," play it cool, I offered in Norwegian, Erik Nodded, "Go to plan B: Fuck it."

"det er aldri så galt at det ikke er godt for noe," Erik spoke so low he may as well have been offering a prayer, Nothing is so bad it can't be useful somehow.

We wrapped the broken window panel with plastic wrap and Gaffer's tape. I would call my landlord from the gate at the airport, let her know there was nothing of value left in the car, that the break-in happened hours before I was due to fly abroad, that I would have it towed to my mechanic's as soon as I could arrange it and that I was sorry about the mess. Such was the experience of crisis to which I had become accustomed; Wile E. Coyote anvils fell onto my head in clusters, always before the execution of elaborate plans. There was only so much hedge one could field against disaster. More often than not, the only option available was to adapt to current crisis, and move forward with the best available option. Planning and contingency had their place, but without ingenuity, planning could only get one so far before options rendered down to nil, leaving one a hostage to paralysis.

"Say, Erik," I blurted as we walked back to our building, cradling the contents of my glove box in my arms. Erik grunted a stoic Norse reply, his held hung low leading with an intellect he didn't abuse, "If Grace comes around..."

"I won't let her near your place," He pointed at the shiner on my face, "She did that to you?"

"She did."

He grunted again, in his broad Norwegian tone, implicitly understanding. We verbalised nothing further on the trek back inside, but everything had been said; a tacit exchange of experience and meaning had occurred between gentlemen. A lucid examination of functionality amidst crisis, and an understanding of emotional implications to be dealt with in private, and then only once immediate threats had been resolved. At the top of the steps we exchanged an embrace, retreating to our respective trenches. The night time gifted us freedom from care, and there were a few hours yet to draw off.

We followed the A20, West of Aycliffe, Past Hougham Battery, bearing a left onto a nondescript turn-off that cut south towards The Channel. It was a brisk and surprisingly clear night. In the glow of Mira's instrument panel, I downshifted into the turn, adapting easily to the left-hand driving of my youth. Mira. A fundamentally un-British name. Almost rebellious in the way it rolled off the tongue, sending tremors through the "R" on the way out. The daughter of Balkan expats who had pulled up stakes and flew to London during the war–a conflict to which my Father was posted, almost moving the family to Croatia where Mira and I would have met a few months earlier than we did.

As it happened, we met while our respective parents where having a lunch business meeting. I had committed the afternoon to beating the High Scores at Afterburner II.

Sat awash in the servoed SEGA arcade cabinet, Mira climbed into the seat, meant to pass as a loose simulacrum of an F-14 cockpit. She scooted me over with her hips.

"What game is this?"

"Ssssh!" I erupted in annoyance at the girl's impertinence, this was my favourite part–Hiroshi Kawaguchi guitar riffs winding up my F-14 cat-shot in 16-bit pixel anticipation. I checked my grip on throttle and joystick; Hell-for-leather, the scourge of Soviet MiGs. The servo-actuators shuddered, throwing my little F-14 down the SEGA Enterprise carrier's steam catapult and into the pristine, endless blue sea of Stage-1. Mira's little-girl giggles undermining the gravity of the occasion. A choreographed dance of raster airplane sprites and simulated missile fire soon to ensue, the fate of the free(ish)-world hanging in my muscle memory.

"Do you want a mini Mars?" She was shoving a candy bar in my face, wearing a look of grim determination. Before I could react it was too late, my F-14 dramatically cut to pieces by a hail of enemy gunfire. She brought it inches closer to me, a coda to my humiliating 16-bit death.

"Fine," I muttered, taking the candy bar, It's the least you can do, now that we've both been vaporised.

"I'm Mira. Now you're my boyfriend,” She pecked me on one dumbfounded eleven-year-old cheek.

I dimmed the headlamps as we crept down the track; beyond lay only those iconic chalky cliffs, and the waters distinct from the Strait of Dover, known historically as The Solent. It may as well have been the edge of the world. It may have been very nearby that Roman Conquerors first set foot on Britain's fields, or where a Norman Host massed for a blistering march against Harold The Pretender's Saxon Shield-wall, where peasants stood on gout-afflicted legs watching King Henry V’s army set sail for fortune and glory on the fields of France. Geography was cogent with history. Humans left their mark on the land, not only by their efforts to tame it, but also spiritually and in memory. I always cast my awareness as far as I could, eschewing the present. I felt born into estrangement; alienated from the here and now. I gravitated towards people who could ground me in the present, help give it meaning. People like Grace. I parked Mira's car and stopped the engine with a turn of the key, then clicked it back to keep the radio on. Four-to-the-floor measures of nondescript percussion and mnemonic steel guitar, a chorus rising above– listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise... "The Chain," by fleetwood mac off of 1977's Rumours. I leaned back against the pile-lined seat covers, drew my motorcycle leather tighter around me in the chill. We sat in silence. I could feel Mira's eyes looking out past the bonnet of her '79 Peugeot 504, as inborn to the Thatcher Era as the Volvo 240 had been to the Reagan Years. Run in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies... She turned, I could feel her eyes looking past me, perhaps at my reflection in the driver's side window.

"She really did one on you, didn't she?" She meant my shiner. Her voice had matured, deepened. She had grown measured. A received, posh London accent masked her inner sweetness.

"I was just getting used to the look. People can normalise to anything," I chuckled. The flight from Grace's four days in the past, the sharp crunching pain in my face had coagulated into a dull ache, thrumming with every heartbeat. I recalled the glares from Airport security at Gatwick, tried to keep my mind from wandering to the muttered speculations of complete strangers. Letting my dusty scouse run free relaxed my face, made the anguish more manageable.

"Why'd you think she hit you?"

"She convinced herself I was cheating. Instead of listening to her case, I went to counter-arguments straight away. I can be a complete asshole: diligent in my hyper commitment to rationality."

"Fuck off. Don't you do that–"

"Do what?"

"Don't you take responsibility for her hitting you." I was astonished at Mira's fervent defense of me against myself. Normalisation of trauma. Dysfunctional people circle each other like binary stars, stable in their destructive potential. A star, with its hydrogen converted, chews on helium; entropy-guaranteed collapse. Such interstellar implosions litter the social cosmos. "Have you reached out to anyone for help?" she continued.

"The Police," an icy twinge ran through my guts at the thought. "And? What did they tell you?"

"Very nice policewoman wouldn't take the report," I reprised my conversation with Officer Kelso from days earlier.

"Are there any resources for men? Men’s domestic Violence hotline?" "There wasn't time," I breathed, shaking my head. "I had to get out of there, so I went to Connolly's"

"A pub?" She exclaimed, throwing a very Balkan questioning gesture up with her hands. It clashed with this new posh, respectable Mira.

"No, no. Connolly's a friend. I needed a mate to put it in perspective for me; the last thing I wanted was to be at the mercy of strangers."

"I am so curious about what you saw in her in the first place," I hadn't noticed her hand had shifted to my thigh. Something shifted in my awareness. I saw the body that went along with Mira's voice for the first time. The so-called "Male Gaze," known by its other non-pejorative name: biology. A response to feminine fertility markers and indications of interest. Mira had turned to face me in the bench seat, brushing Joan Jett locks from her eyes. She was beautiful, her face the results of an exquisite collision between Bosnian and Turkish, "American Girls are so... volatile, and those ridiculous nasal accents..."

"They have their charms," I tried to break contact, look away from Mira's generous legs, stay on theoretical ground.

"I'm all ears..." Her hand was making its way out of thigh territory and to more private ground. I wasn't yet sure if I wanted it there– And if you don't love me now, You will never love me again.

"You can't judge individuals by averages, I always say that. Still–," her fingers were working their way into my pocket. I had not yet ruled on their trespass, "they're less cynical; able to tap into a wonderment, a wide-eyed enthusiasm about things that's both irritating and infectious. So many of them exude bravado, a way of being in the world–loud and in charge. But... if you can get them to drop the act, tap the breaks a little bit," she had undone my jeans and was boldly advancing, claiming territory, "get them to let you in, you see sweetness, vulnerability, they're afraid of everyth–" She was kissing me. My jaw throbbed as I received it. I cupped her face in my hands, eased us apart.

"Mira," I whispered her name, "at least you're consistent," recalling that first kiss at age 11 in an arcade cabinet in London, I flashed her a smile.

"I was such a little tart," she flushed.

"Believe me, I don't want to stop you. It's not you, or anything you've done. You're my oldest friend. You're a kind, courageous, beautiful woman and I do see mutual desire living between us." I kept her face gently in my hands, she nodded, "It's only been four days since Grace hit me. My face still hurts. I think I'm still in shock. I'm in no place for... this, as beautiful as this is, and as turned on as I am, I can't be open to anyone right now. Everything is fogged up and I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if I can trust my desires, my judgement... I don't know if I can let a woman in right now–" Cycles upon cycles, what if one simply stepped off the path?

"What she did to you, I just want to make it better. I just want to make it go away–" Tears streamed down from her burnt sienna eyes, eyeliner staining puffy cheeks. She reached out with a trembling hand, searching through tear-blurred blobs of colour for my bruised face, touched it, felt me wince, shocked herself back, "how could she do that to you?" Horror, exasperation, helplessness. I had seen much the same look glaring back at me in the rearview mirror on my flight from Grace's. I held Mira to me, our hearts pounded in simpatico, everything racing. She released a torrent of sobs into my shoulder. Beyond the fogged windows of the car there was nothing. We were cosmonauts in time and memory, holding onto the moment as much as each other. Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows), Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows), Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows),Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows), Chain... keep us together...

"I don't have a dog in the fight," I explained to Colin, my training driver. The AC in our truck was kaput, and we were already cooking in the 2018 summer heat. A national inquest regarding a Supreme-Court Justice was underway and sectarian tensions ran high. I had the affliction of an ability to see nuance and Portland was no harbor for independents such as myself; everyone was compelled to pick a side. Obsolescence and apoptosis; apoptosis being cell death from disease. What of human apoptosis? The checking out of, or nihilism towards narcississtic protocol. "I despise the man's permissive policies on domestic surveillance. Of course, no one wants to talk about policy—High School Civics was boring! I know! Let's drag the man’s sex life, from thirty years ago, into the spotlight, that’ll do the trick!”

"But he's one of them. This is Portland. They're not welcom here..." Colin played a mean devil's advocate. Under the veneer of his easygoing temperament and a laugh that instantly filled the space of the cab, we sparred over everything, from the best Beatles Album and the proper listening order of Van Halen's Catalouge to Rick Deckard's ambiguous replicant status.

“I don’t care. They're all one of them to me. It's the principle that matters," I was growing more vocal in my convictions, less concerned with optics, "set a legal precedent, we all become subject to it. Proof is the fuel by which the engine of justice runs. Justice does not mean having a result that you think is desirable. It means a verdict has been decided based on what has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s not perfect, but it's the closest we get to objectivity. Without that, all you have is the mob and the mob is fickle, its passions easily manipulated by the influential–often to tyranny."

Colin cut left, off the Hawthorne Bridge tacking into the Portlandia district, past Terry Shrunck Park which had played host to Occupy Wall Street protestors when I first arrived. The city surfed the wave of the 1960s, as it had been marketed, straight into hubris. The Baby Boomer Manifest Destiny of progressive change may have presented a necessary upset to the hyper-conservatism of post-World War II America, but one had to remember that Levittown cookie-cutter orthodoxy was a psychological reaction to the apocalyptic scale of the war. Americans had largely sat out World War I, showing up late to the party as ever. The psychological intercourse between warfare and social organization hadn't affected Americans the way it had Europeans. Those who built the America of the 1950s were the first generation of Americans that had seen the true fragility of civilization reified by carpet-bombed European cities. It had created a desperation to escape into The American Dream, much in the same way as someone who grew up fending off cockroaches kept their adult home in apple-pie order. The 1960s Great Society revolution itself had mutated into the very thing it once stood in opposition to: the establishment; corrupt, power-mad, dogmatic. Every revolution carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. This was an old story, from Robespierre to Che Guevara.

“So you’re an anarchist?”

“I don’t know!”

“But you're defending fascists!”

“I'm defending a principle that was codified, by your founding fathers, in opposition to Authoritarianism."

“But everyone we don't like is Hitler,” He was teasing, but offering me a chance to make my case. I bit, with gusto.

“I know this is 2018 and you're meant to slap the label of fascist onto whomever the hoi polloi are upset with this week, But Fascism is a very distinct set of principles that demand the body-politic of a nation gather all their efforts in support of the state. Physically. Psychologically and Emotionally. Total unity." I held up a lone finger, illustrating my point, " a straw alone can be broken," My other fingers joined the first one, making a closed, flat hand, "Fascisme, a cluster of straws gathered together cannot be. That’s diametrically opposed to my ideal. I’m an individualist. I want liberty from tyranny, the freedom to pursue my own potential without coercion, from the state or anyone else. That is directly oppositional to fascism."

"Ok, I gotcha," he bobbed his head for a windup, "So you're The Klingons?"

"Kirk era? Or Picard?" Now we were even deeper in my territory. I had him on political theory, and Star Trek was scripture to me.

"Definitely Kirk."

"Okay. Kang, Kor, or Koloth?"

"Kor's a drunk, Koloth's too nebbish, but Kang... He had gravitas–you're Kang, only with better hair."

"I can live with that."

This was the timbre of philosophical debates amongst men; passionate, heated, but never personal. At the end of the day, we were comrades working together to achieve an objective. Nothing else mattered. Conflict was not a thing to be avoided; it was a test of integrity, principles, spirit. In dire straits, each of us set aside petty differences, chipping away at the objective. Cross the finish line; take that hill, lads! Any grievances arisen would be settled at dusk, over a bottle of suds, the hatchet soon buried. Ours was an agrestal existence aligned with nature.

In the warehouse, I realised my longing for a fraternal order; a masculine terrain where one inspired through example, jived, debated and philosophized. Never boorish, simply unconcerned with those discarnate apprehensions given undue weight by the Oprah generation; mere monsters under the bed. Instead of the emotional abstractions that simulated problems, we faced down reality. Easy Company in Bastogne, surrounded by the might of the Wehrmacht; The 20th Maine holding the Union Army's naked left flank at Little Round Top against endless Johnny Reb waves of ruin–epigenetic narratives that drove men to produce and excel. These were working-class, salt-of-the-Earth guys, gathered around the dusty warehouse radio, listening to the Baseball Game, hanging on every pitch. Chockablock with the sterling vigor of The Wild One and The Great Escape, It agreed with my 1950s Greaser aesthetic and sensibilities, hair pomaded, prison denim shirt sleeves cuffed, all selvedge and Wayfarers. I tapped into the long dormant swagger of my youth, stuck two fingers up at the hyper-managed, middle-class milquetoast culture, its schoolmarmish chiding keeping our hairy spirits on ice.

Now, supporting the wrong baseball team or football club was casus belli. Underrated by the reckoning of the Geeks, Nerds, Stoners, Metal-heads and Art Students that had populated my springtime, sports served a vital function amongst the unofficial gentleman's clubs in which I now moved. It served simulacrum for tribal warfare, the last vestige of competition and conquest allowed in our reticent progressive era. I began to forget all about the world of advertising agencies and production companies that had been the stage for my last 16 years. There's was an environment as curated as the collections they hawked to the American Consumer; common snake oil against nihilism. Compared to the vacuous political grandstanding, the soy latte ectomorph cynical utterances from goldfish mouths, my new fraternity felt damn honest.

Another day, another patrol, we descended into the basement warehouse vino bunker, a Jesuit cave wherein the vice that gussied up a city stood in standby, "So What" off of Miles Davis' 1951 Kind of Blue wafting up Jack Rackham stairs. Ours was a sanctuary where Socratic dialogues held sway, proletarian philosophizing as afternoon sport. Chip, a tall scarecrow of a man who had once been a Grip on Cameron’s most infamous set, The Abyss, was master of the record player, needling pristine vinyl through the hard wires of a Pioneer sx-1980 as pristine and beloved as Connolly's. Skylar, a wiry powerhouse of a guy who looked more the Italian fisherman than his alleged German stock declared. He should have been playing short-stop for the 1965 Cleveland Indians; here he was moving hand trucks of wine at supersonic speeds. Always the life of the party, he regaled us with his brazen attempts at romance–something this line of work presented a cornucopia of opportunities for in the form of hard-to-get hostesses; a man with a girl in every bar. Colin, 50 and not a day over 37, with a nuclear metabolism and wake the dead pipes, exuded confidence, the sort of guy who, when strutting into the room, everything was going to be peachy. Travis, one half of the office, brought to mind many of the agency guys I'd worked with; quit-witted, sarcastic, but with a grounded quality that rendered him approachable. You could always count on him for the straight dope. Ally was the office's other half; a dishy Sicilian firebrand wrapped up in the girl-Friday package. Brilliant, mesmeric and loyal she was everyone's plucky, matter-of-fact sister, every bit as potent in a boardroom as a bar-brawl; we all may have been in love with her though to confess as much risked eroding the fraternity. Confirmation lay in the admiring silence whenever she left the room, molasses thick with longing. Then there was Stan, running the show with a rocksteady beach-bum collectedness that complemented his taste for Jazz records. As a decade long business owner, I had long been reluctant to take orders, but Stan treated his employees like human beings, was never afraid to get his hands dirty, and was willing to extend me that precious commodity oh so rare in my eight years in Portland: a chance. I respected him immediately and had no qualms about calling him Boss. Finally there was me, the fish-out-of water; a man with a past no one would have believed. Diligent, unassuming, terminally iconoclastic; regarded as professorial and complicated, but haunted by something no one could name, and no one dared ask about. We few, we happy few.

"This guy," bellowed Colin, tossing a thumb over his shoulder at me, "went from civics to Star Trek in less than 60 seconds!" We appeared in the warehouse, King Harry and Falstaff, returned from the gates of Harfleur, tossing our respective kits onto convenient pallets of Amity Pino Noir–wine passed for furniture in that utilitarian space.

"Why're you working this job again?" Skylar, burrito in hand, cut in from across the floor, a shock of raven hair erupting from under a maroon watch cap, "Dude should be teaching at some college somewhere. Someone get this man some elbow pads and three cute TAs," He had an accent that was a third Minnesota, a third Queens, and a third just Skylar.

"I don't think 'TA' means what you think it means there, Bud," Chip, chiming in from the shipping desk, blowing some nondescript loess from the record as he flipped to the B-side, his face glowing under a high key industrial pendant lamp out of Raiders of the Lost Ark throwing hard shadows along his hawkish face.

"I turned my back on Hollywood," I called back, grabbing a stack of purchase orders from my route–downtown Portland plus every New Seasons in Beaverton, "–threw my lot in with the common man." My final pittance of shoots had just ended; a series for Rolling Stone, Land's End's 2018 Winter catalogue and WWE Smackdown. I resisted the temptation to take them as signs things were turning around; they were mere blips on an otherwise downward trajectory. I didn't see my relationship to those brands as elevating me above these guys, just because of my background or profession. I looked up to them, their self-reliance, their gonzo spirit, as Hunter would have said. They were quintessential American men with a hard-won day-to-day wisdom about the only thing that really mattered: people. I could delight them with my travel stories and anecdotes about directors and movie stars, but when it came to naked human nature, I studied at their feet.

"Hear, hear," Chip dropped the needle on the record, the first notes of "All Blues" cushioned the dialogue.

"The angst! It's making me twenty years younger!" Colin's contribution to the banter, punctuated by a PeeWee Herman laugh. He tossed me an Agate, which I snatched out of the air. He was a devoted rock-hound.

"I gotta hold on to my angst," I grunted, slipping into my best Al Pacino from Heat "I preserve it because I need it. It keeps me sharp," snap, "on the edge," snap "where I gotta be." Movie references were currency, they bought affiliation. Collective callbacks to a pop-mythology that transcended societal schism. This was the old function of cinema, to unify. Our ancestors would gather around the fire while hoodoo holy men spun myths about gods and great beasts. Now we gazed into the fire itself and had mass visions; Galaxies far-far away, archaeologists battling Nazis over holy relics, misfit kids finding a pirate ship on the Oregon coast, a slacker from '85 in '55; ensuring his parents fall in love–otherwise he's toast, a terrified woman descending into a nuclear reactor meltdown to save a little girl from Alien superpredators. Cinema diverted from its mythological function, hijacked by postmodern deconstructionists. Worse, they used nostalgia as the Trojan Horse for current day political nagging. Unwanted and blown off by the same agencies who publicly lamented their inability to find people like me, was this just me making necessity a virtue? A case of sour grapes rationalised by my Art School baggage? What had insulated me against weaponised dialectic? I had read all the same books by Derrida, Foucault and others. Regurgitating the anti-capitalist agitprop came easy, but I was like the kid holding fish oil between tooth and cheek, spitting it out when his mother wasn't looking.

People asked if I had seen this or that new film. Nope. I was indifference incarnate. Making necessity a virtue, I embraced the decline of my hopes and dreams I missed working with the technology, but the joy making motion pictures had gifted me over 16 years turned to ash in my mouth. My cameras sat at home collecting dust. My newfound blue-collar reality was as much a panacea as it was a necessity. I threw myself into the role with vigor.

We emerged from the vino bunker, into the mid-Summer haze of boomtown Portland. There were yet hours to devour, my commute a mere five minutes up Stark to Kerns.

"Good work today, buddy. See ya tomorrow," Skylar patted me on the back, cigarette hanging from his teeth. He was heading to My Father's Place, an old Portland diner a stone's throw away known for its comfort food, and Lounge atmosphere. Geography was always saturated with memory. I had been there once, some 2:00 am post-soirée frolic, with a producer friend who insisted on walking along slick neon-lit streetcar tracks three sheets to the wind on cheap Vodka. I snatched all 115 pounds of her out of the way of oncoming traffic, vainly sobered her up with black coffee and pancakes while she spilled the beans on her bender. As married to her career as her husband, she had been served up with divorce papers citing neglect. One couldn't know what was going on just beneath another's skin; in that space between the ears, entire worlds could be in collapse, the aftershocks not always apparent to the naked eye. I took her home, put her to bed, called a cab. As with many career women who had come and gone throughout my life, I had seen that which no mere mortal man was allowed: her vulnerability. She never called me again.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays, a line that took on new meaning as I grew seasoned on the job. Thursdays were my longest, when I tended to have the bigger accounts–grocers ordering 25 cases of wine a piece–that's 300 bottles, usually mixed and matched. A single case weighed 35 pounds. I moved 5 at a time on a tiny hand truck. 175 pounds of fragile and often expensive, product. Everyone's order was the most important thing in the universe–to them. Be punctual. Be accurate and break nothing. I often failed at the latter, once or twice in front of customers. Stan, unfazed shrugged.

"It's only wine."

Zupan's on West Burnside was among my most daunting accounts, My last stop in Southwest before the Beaverton Gauntlet propelled me into high-median anxiety. Accepted past receiving, through the cramped spaces of the stockroom, I emerged onto the sales floor–an obstacle course of culinary delights, not-all-there Boomers maundering through on island-time, stocking up on Rieslings before lunch. The familiar rapid-fire banter that graced my eardrums belonged to Due. Despite his Vietnamese heritage, he was the undisputed sensei of the meat-counter. He always greeted me with a bear hug and ten minutes of catching up. Had he known me a decade before this would have been verboten. Now at 36, having washed out of my calling, I was happy to be seen at all.

“I said to my wife, 'this is all the money I will probably ever make. I can promise you my devotion, but I am happy and secure in where I am professionally, so take it or leave it!' " Due was imparting his wisdom to a ginger twenty-something with gauged ears, the kid was nodding at speed, trying his best to keep up, " 'you wanna find a richer guy? Go right ahead! You are free. You wanna stay with me, then you accept what I have told you. No complaints,' See? No wavin' a gun around, Just people seeing things for what they are, with the chance to turn back behind them," There endeth the lesson. Due saw me approach, gave me a side-long embrace. I always made it a point to pass his butcher's counter on the way to the wine section, weigh-in on whatever hot debates were on-offer each week. He was in the same fraternity as Connolly and a handful of others; men who could be relied upon. They would help bury a body in the woods, if push came to shove, take the secret to their grave. If I found myself in a foxhole with any of them, my heart would be no home for fear. "Josh's girl's telling him he's not making enough money," Due, bringing me up to speed, " I told him about me and the wife–Laid it all out for her, real simple. Let her choose. She chose to stay, nobody to blame but herself now." He spread his hands in that universal capisce gesture, "You gotta girl, right Corey?"

"I have," I set the hand truck down, the wine could wait on a little philosophy between gentlemen, I mopped my brow with a bandana, and crossed my feet, vaguely aware of a faint wetness between my legs. My little problem never failed to remind me of its presence.

"She ever make you so mad, you think about leaving her?" Due asked. I wasn't in the habit of talking about Justine, or our relationship, but I knew she was talking about me. All her girlfriends knew my business, harbored their assessments; points added and deducted from the boyfriend scorecard. I conducted myself with class around them, but never forgot their first loyalty was to Justine. A sisterhood of accountability deflection formed around them. They couldn't be counted on for their impartiality or objectivity. A few of these blurred the lines between friend and colleague; had so expertly made a mess of their personal lives, that mere proximity to mine was unsettling. I presumed Justine considered my friends the same way. Such was often the state of affairs with men and women.

"You bet," I shrugged. It was the natural course of things. She pissed me off, I pissed her off. We made our assessments, weighed the pros and cons of staying or going, made our choice. When I inevitably wound her up, Justine would exclaim through a playful grin, "That's it! I'm outta here!" Flirtatious, Holden Caulfield horsing around. An admission that, despite our hook line and sinker weirdness, we were in it for the long haul.

"But you haven’t left her?"

"I made a commitment," I declared, throwing him a no-brainer shrug, "When it's good it's really good and I'm far from perfect–I can't demand something of my girl that I'm not embodying myself," I shifted my weight, my right side screaming in pain. Nothing left but to push through it until I could return to the truck, dose on painkillers. I hoped the guys didn't notice.

"What about commitment to yourself though?" This was the kid, jockeying for position in the experiential arena we older men dominated, "any alpha guy would threaten to leave! How can she respect you!" Alpha and Beta, I knew this puerile taxonomy, understood why some guys became obsessed with it. Too many of us were reared with no masculine presence, or as was my case, fathers whose role ended with prevision; who checked out with the Nightly News and sports, a love affair with the airwave goddess of television. The father-son bonds of yesteryear had largely been left there. Some young men sought out surrogate fathers online, or in literature for guidance; a map by which to navigate an atomised masculine terrain, a perception of immense and pervasive feminine influence. Others retreated into video games, or pornography, isolated into base-mammalian fixations, felt no stake in things; anomie, that's what one called it. The breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community in which they existed. I didn't hold media fueled moral-panic, or the Soccer-Moms of America trying to legislate away this sickness of the soul as a viable solution; employing violence-by-proxy to stem violence, a frustrating cognitive dissonance. Instead, I trusted in the connections I could forge face-to-face with the men that inhabited my everyday life. Despite the geographical discontinuity of my youth, I always had a band of mates. The way of men is the way of the gang; the wolfpack. I offered guidance to the wayward where I could, made calculated observations. The Kid's desire for dominance stemmed from his slight build; he wasn't physically substantial enough to pose a threat to other men, so he wanted to make up for it by dominating women. As I saw it, the problem was in dialectic: conflicting energies, call them what you like "yin", "yang", "masculine", "feminine"... equally potent, and equally valuable forces that needed to be in balance for a harmonious functioning of the world. Neither should be in dominance over the other, within an individual or in the world that individual inhabited. Both needed tapping into at times– situation specific–but neither was morally superior. Due turned to me, a wing-leader letting his wingman manehouvre for advantage.

"Say you have kids. Do you think threatening to leave is ethical?" That got the kid's attention, set the gears in motion, "See, my parents used the divorce-bomb my whole life to keep each other in line and I felt Responsible, irrational as that is. I get there's this notion that most unhappy women are only as such because their man is failing to show dominance, but I don't buy into that bullshit. You can't control anyone else, only yourself. "

"I've met his girlfriend," Due interjected.

"What's she like?"

"Fat and unhappy," The kid rolled his eyes, throwing a mental barrel roll to shake of Due's nimble laughter, "pretty much the Portland average!"

"Well, there you go–no self-control. People without self-control are obsessed with controlling others," I meant it as much about him as I did his girl, "Don't ask me why it works that way." Years of close friendships with women, had brought me to understanding many of them never liked hearing: Keeping a man around is quite simple; be such a good catch, make him feel so lucky to have you in his life that he will move Heaven and Earth to keep you. By extension this advice wasn't sex-specific. Don't let yourself go, be accountable and don't be a nag. It worked both ways. You can’t berate someone into being better. You can only be someone they won't risk losing. "Look at you, you're not a bum. You work, you're paying your bills, you're responsible, you've got good hygiene, you're not fucking other women, right?"

"Of course not..." I was getting under his skin, as an older man should.

"Then the basic, very reasonable criteria, underwriting any healthy relationship, have been met. This doesn't mean there aren't problems, but problems should be discussed rationally. If she’s nagging you, the cause is likely her own insecurity. The first place she ought to look for troubleshooting is herself—is she appealing to you? Is she someone you want to spend time around, or do you avoid her?"

"Yeah, I guess I try and stay out of her way." The kid had given ground, shuffling his feet. Somewhere there was a head of Romaine in need of his deft attentions.

"Look, either break up with her–that would be the humane thing to do, or be the best version of yourself you can be. If she sees you taking responsibility for yourself, she either has the willpower to meet you in that, in a way that works for her, or she doesn't. No manipulation. No controlling. No power-games. No psychological warfare. Just self-ownership."

"Wow..." The kid nodded, dazed, "I'll give that some thought," Due slapped me on the back. We watched him shuffle off, shell-shocked.

"Think he's got a chance, Doctor?" Due asked, a glimmer in his epicanthic eyes.

"Oh, no. I was his age once. I'm afraid he's certifiably fucked."

Later I returned home, the conversation with Due and The Kid still ringing in my ears after ten hours. I hauled my worn and sore body up the steps, into the courtyard. Huck's face peering from under the linen drapes that diffused the light from our living room. I opened our door and stood in the gauntlet of two wriggling dogs. Bitsy, our cat peering from the hallway, observing, taking mental feline notes.

"Hi, Boyfriend!" Justine's call from the bedroom.

"Hey, girlfriend!" I called back, setting my canvas work bag down on the office chair, submitting to canine licks on my hands in the festive evening light of our home.

"How was your day?" Her voice rose over the tinny palaver of some nondescript reality show–they were all the same to me. I glanced into the dining room, taking stock. Her grad school work occupying the dinette, black faux leather workbag to hand. An open wine bottle, within easy reach on one the wraparound bars, an orchid ring already staining the 1950s formica countertop. Killing my ego, driving the truck was evidence that I took 100% responsibility for getting a grip on my financial half of the household. I had the receipts. Why was I still coming home to this maudlin drinking?

"Busy, but no mishaps today," I wrapped my voice around the corner so she could hear.

"Did you break any wine?"

"I broke all the wine," Setting the stage with humour seemed the best course of action, always. It lubricated the tensions between our walls. Every interaction was a reset. "How was your day?" I asked, Bitsy announcing her arrival with a breathed click as Justine appeared in the dining room, wine glass in hand, pouring a refill.

She de-briefed her day in retina-detaching detail; the drama between teachers and her fellow para-educators, her students and their varying household horrors. Conflict took hold inside me: on the one hand I wanted to support Justine and her career endeavours. On the other, I lived in the eyes of a maelstrom of frustration and bewilderment, wondering if our own children would play second-fiddle to her students. From my limited outsider's perspective, her work environment appeared out of balance; devoid of any masculine rigor that could divert the destructive potential of some of her more troublesome students to constructive purpose. It seemed that she and the professional sisterhood in which she moved, thrived on the daily-drama of the Special-Ed room; a grotesque soap-opera from Hell that served no one. Most of these were minority kids who would graduate into a world unprepared. Where was the diligence and preparation they needed? Daily she came home, reporting that some student–often one of a handful of usual suspects–"popped off." Isolating them became commonplace, a disturbing policy from on-high, that seemed tailor made to condition these at-risk youths to a future as inmates, where solitary confinement would be the norm. Offering what constructive suggestions I could, I listened, keeping my concerns in standby. Privately troubled. Being emotionally open about this inner conflict frightened me. Justine often described my live-processing soliloquies as "triggering." Therefore a core aspect of my being was triggering. I didn’t know how to parse that, so I clammed up. Surrounded by eggshells, lack of self-expression became poisonous.

She said otherwise, but it seemed that Justine's career was just a job, another tick on the status scorecared. The Sandbergian ideal in action; building a life of horological commodities–the house, the job, the SUV, the husband, the money, the kids... Marketing spin passed off as moral imperative; so phoney. Wracked with doubt, I didn't know what I was to her: a hard cock, a wallet, some milestone on the road to the attainment of the new feminine mystique; not a human being with dreams, feelings, or history, just a lynch-pin to her having it all. The greater implications of her work, unapparent in her awareness–at least as she communicated it to me. She would laugh and share the goings on of the Special-Ed room, almost as entertainment–certainly not inappropriate to any professional's need to keep her career and its myraid stresses in perspective, but I never saw her concerned about the room's daily happenings on a philosophical level. Unsure if it was coming from her history of existential doubt in the face of endless vocational let-downs–the continuity there being a cycle of emotional investment followed by nuke-from-orbit emotional ejection–or the cool-chick cynicism embodied by those collegaues she admired; I sensed dissociation.

I slipped into the bathroom, undid my jeans, used the toilet. My underwear was bloodstained, how did I go all day like this? Being by nature tidy, neat as a pin. The faint but unmistakable rotting fish odor, with blood in evidence–hematochezia. I flushed, washed, moved into the bedroom half-naked my heart skipping. Time was Justine would be there, ready with a firm slap on the ass. She was in bed, wearing a white button down she'd appropriated from my throwaways, and black yoga pants, her secondhand MacBook on her lap, glass of wine in hand which she never seemed to spill on the mostly white duvet. I opened the closet, grabbed a fresh pair of underwear.

"Boyfriend, where did your ass go?" I had noticed myself losing weight, and was privately relieved. My long history of body hatred and male anorexia satisfied that my full derriere was melting away. It always seemed disturbingly African, distent with the primitive sexuality associated to that part of my heritage.

"Between this job, and the way I walk the dogs, I'm not surprised I'm losing weight."

"There's loosing weight, but whatever this is," she ran a hand down my figure in mid-air, "It's happening just a little too fast..." She was correct, of course. I refused to see it. To my mind-state, it seemed an attempt to shift the spotlight from her unhealthy lifestyle. She gained weight, but I stuck around, valuing her many other qualities. When we first got together, she was tighter in those sensuous regions; slimmer but not skinny, voluptuous in that Bettie Page way that fired up my Greaser imaginings. Never having a "Type," just a threshold where my physical attraction to a given woman fell off; purely biological, not ideological. I had clumsily pointed it out to her once, wounding her when I meant to be constructive. There was nothing but to tack into the wind; set an example by attaining a healthy weight and toning up–use inspiration in lieu of criticism. She began a low-carb diet, it fell away. She tried Cross-fit, it fell away. She took up yoga, that fell away. This comment seemed, at the time and in that context, an attempt to lull me into a state of relative unattractiveness, thereby acquitting her letting go. In the abstract, I was shadowboxing a sardonic Cosmopolitan Magazine attitude that brazenly browbeat men into accepting ever lower standards in women, for the sake of political correctness, while entitling women to hold men to stratospheric demands.2 Who could say how much of an influence that was in the day-to-day of things.

"Is this why we haven't been having sex? You barely touch me any more..." The last time we'd had sex: July 4th at Lost Lake. It wasn't the love making of previous years. It felt desperate, like we were both at the mercy of a rapid; grasping to anything to anchor us against the inevitable.

"We haven't had sex, because I kind of don't want you bleeding on me," That's funny, because I don't recall ever saying that to you when you hounded me for sex on your period. Double-standards were the physics by which men and women danced.

"I see," I would have been well justified to point out the double-standard and cold, uncaring way with which she expressed that sentiment. Picking my battles had long been the order of the day, which seemed sensible–the avoidance of a massive conflict that would threaten everything we had built over the years. It was a terrible habit of mine, a coping strategy borne of codependency. At least conflict presented an opportunity for action. Avoiding conflict transmuted tensions into a war of attrition, each side scoring tiny scathing victories, wearing each other down to nil, "I thought you were stressed, preoccupied. A foot massage might open things up."

"No, that's okay," my foot massages used to be as good as gold, now they've gone Soviet, "suit yourself. You do seem tense..."

"I'm just really stressed out about paying for things right now. PPS got my payroll wrong again and I've been dealing with the same stupid lady who messed it up the last time. Money is just tight. I'm glad you got the wine job; it's fine for now, but at some point..." I tried, I really tried, I thought in that moment, a knot tightening inside me, I can't force her to feel less stressed or upset, she has to come to that on her own. Help her feel heard, then exit. You deserve some quite time, you've been doing manual labour all day and have to come home to this. It's maddening

"Don't disagree on any particular point. Money is tight," yet how much do you spend a week on wine, Justine? I ran the numbers: Assume an average of two bottles a night, a decent bottom shelf cabernet runs $7.00. I usually see a bottle or two in your faux leather workbag when you come home. For shits and giggles, that's $14.00 spent per night, conservatively, six nights a week. 14.00 x 6 = 84.00. At $84.00 per week, with roughly 52.14 weeks in a year, 84 x 52.14 = 4,379.76. Throw in an extra 20 bottles in a year, for camping and holidays, of varying quality, say on average $9.00 per bottle, 9 x 20 = $180.00. Now we're up to $4,556.76, but wait! There's more! Birthdays; Yours, mine, sister's. New Year's Day Brunch Mimosas. Date Nights, so what? 16 instances give or take? You pay a premium for alcohol in restaurants, but we'll say $8 a glass, 8 x 16 = 128.00. Thats puts us at ≈ $4,684.76 for a hypothetical year of booze. $4,684.76 ÷ 1,410.00 = 3.32, that's a hair under four months rent. If we saved that much for three years we'd be halfway to a downpayment on a house. That's a Hell of a lot of money to spend medicating away anxiety.

All of this I stupidly kept to myself. I was paralysed with inaction. Everything I said seemed to start an argument and I could already hear her rebuttals, "I'm not buying wine every day and even if I was, $14.00 is not that big of a deal!" and "You're drinking it too!" Frightened of becoming the controlling boyfriend stereotype that I heard ad nauseum from the women around me, I was no use to her. I was unwilling to risk losing her in order to help her resolve the problems underlying this destructive alcoholism. I wasn't showing empathy–for her, or for us. To demonstrate leadership, that was my responsibility and I failed. I was so beaten down by a mounting sense of inefficacy in the world; bargaining from the ninth circle of hell. Stop being a tremendous fuck up at life, and she’ll stop drinking! Stop failing! Stop being a reject! She’s only drinking because she’s managing anxiety caused by everything you touch turning to shit in your hands!

Broaching the topic of Justine's drinking, felt like a hostage situation. I suggested tea after work instead. On nights when she came home first, she found some excuse to open a wine bottle and "decompress." she’s an adult. I bargained with myself, I don’t get to tell her what to do any more than she gets to tell me what to do. How not to be an enabler? I enjoyed a nice scotch or glass of wine after a long day myself. My desire to have my own pleasures gave Justine little incentive to cut back. Some couples dieted together, or took up jogging. One half of the couple pointing out a potentially relationship-ending trend, offering to go along on the recovery journey side-by-side is what made a positive volte-face possible; It wasn’t conditional.

“Boyfriend! Maybe we should stop drinking for a month,” Or, maybe you should take 100% responsibility for your drinking and cut back. I’m not the one with the drinking problem. Agreeing under those conditional standards felt wrong. Accepting her premise, it was only a matter of time before inevitable relapse was blamed on me; I "wasn't supportive enough" or "we can't have wine in the house, if I'm going to stop!" Against my better judgement, I loved and was trying to salvage a relationship with, a wino. What did that say about me? Of course the only steady job I could get was driving a wine truck; the gods are not without a sense of irony.

By now I was sleeping on the sofa from the pain, releasing my pelvic floor with YouTube yoga videos devouring my post-work evenings. The air was sometimes as hot under our roof on those summer nights as it was outside, when tarmac surrendered its trapped heat to the dusk air, a city's pent up elan vital collective sigh. Wrung out by domestic conflict, I drove up to the airport, to a little parking spot along the ILS glide-path to Runway 28L, the departing 737-800s roaring just overhead, so close I felt I could reach out and hitch a ride. Watching the ILS lights in sequence, bokeh in the heat haze, as if the signal patterns would offer inspiration for decoding the problem of the human heart, I felt unprepared to deal with emotional crises on the fly. They tended to enkindle my repressed trauma, my panicked feeling that I was responsible for Justine's emotional state. When I wet my toes wading into the waters of other's emotionality I usually lost my way, resorting to the place where I felt most comfortable and most in control of myself: the hyper rational. Logic became my only tool for parsing human relations. It annoyed the Hell out of others. What fictions lived in her head about me became an obsession. What drove the anxiety she drowned with alcohol?

There were two topics that, without fail, metastasized into arguments. When in the grand scheme of the relationship would marriage and children occur? When would my health insurance deficiency be mitigated, facilitating a doctor's visit about my sudden weight loss and the bloody and painful mess below the belt? I remembered a conversation in my car, driving to some out-of-the-way dive bar on Powell. I had outlined my financial plans, setting personal milestones along a path that needed walked before I felt ready to get married and start a family. I thought I was demonstrating responsibility, that I understood the gravity of such an undertaking. It bothered Justine that marriage and children seemed so far down the list of quoted milestones.

"You know that I want marriage and children, and that's not even on your list!" She exclaimed. Already I felt that rising terror after the telltale landmine pressure-plate click, "It's like I don't even exist for you," She had a fair point, but when put like that–with such an edge of blame–I didn't want to listen. I instantly dropped into a mental fighting stance. The height of emotion is not the time to solve problems. I was paying the price for some epigenetic narrative—the men in her family fail and the women are mere victims of their indulgence. If I was truly such a horrible boyfriend, she wouldn’t be living with me, she wouldn’t be nagging me about a wedding ring, she wouldn’t be hounding me about when we are having babies. Evidence mattered–far and away above words. "We both have careers. Throw kids into the mix: who is raising them?" The Sandbergian "you can have it all" ideal. Maybe one could, but not all at the same time, "One of us is going to have to stay home with them," who the fuck has kids planning to run back to work? What's the point of having them if we're barely involved? I didn't know how to communicate to her this was bringing up deep anxieties from my own childhood. My parents, heavily invested in their elite status, bought me off with toys and elaborate holidays in strange countries. Oblivious to the lonely and isolated child they tolerated. With my business failing, I didn't see how I could even provide the material comforts. I wasn’t about to just have kids on a whim and suss out the details later; that reeked of irresponsibility, aer I say child abuse. I didn't see parenting as a fly-by-night situation.

"We’ll just get a Guatemalan niñera," we'll figure it out! It'll be fine! People do this all the time! Stop ruining this for me!

"Oh, the irony! The self-professed progressive, claiming to champion Latin causes, and yet the possibility that a Latin American immigrant to this country might want something a little better for herself than to raise some gringa’s spoiled kids sails past your reckoning." Will wonders never cease... These mental gymnastics unsettled me, that it was somehow un-feminist of Justine to raise her own kids, to say nothing of the fact that she wouldn't be doing it alone– I had every intention of being involved. No ideology survived contact with reality.

"I don’t know what to tell you," she shrugged.

"You needn't tell me anything but the truth. You've done that and I don't fault you for it. Thank you, really."

There remained the other element in the room: the drinking. I saw marriage as being fundamentally about children. Casting my imagination down the tunnel of time, I did not want my kids to ever come up to me and say, "Dad, why is Mommy drunk all the time?" anymore than I would have wanted them to ask Justine, "Mommy, why can't Daddy afford nice things like Robby's parents?" I did not feel I had the right to bring children into a less than ideal situation. As such, until the issues in the relationship, with Justine and myself as individuals, were resolved, marriage and children were off the table. It was more than just the pressure of the biological clock ticking away, Justine seemed to regard marriage and children as boxes to tick on the status scorecard; mere commodities meant to ameliorate her insecurities. I didn't want to repeat the epigenetic cycle of my birth, marrying out of vanity like my own parents had. I wanted to marry out of love, because I had chosen a woman whose values were so exemplary, so inspirational, that I couldn't imagine not having children with her.

Marriages exist in a social ecosystem. When we consider a prospective marriage partner, we have to also consider the people they surround themselves with. You can judge a man (woman) by the company he (she) keeps, as the old adage goes. Sabrina, Justine's closest work colleague and new best friend was embodied the stereotypical career woman who's life was a hell-on-wheels relational train-wreck. I appreciated Sabrina's support of Justine as she advanced in her education and career, but I worried about the lack of professionalism that characterized their relationship. They texted constantly; sharing boy drama like a gaggle of middle school cheerleaders. Sabrina lived in a hoarded to the rafters house, which she shared with another woman and her son, raising her daughter with a steady stream of men passing through their lives like a port of call. Sabrina was also younger than me, but from her careworn face I would never have guessed.

The previous October we had all gone to the Sauvie Island pumpkin patch to pick Halloween Pumpkins. While Sabrina and Justine were chatting away in the warmth of a glorious Indian Summer, Lily–Sabrina's toddler–attempted to sit on my lap, calling me "Daddy." I turned my lap away, placed a hand on hers and led her to sit next to me instead. I had only just met her. I didn't want her to feel rejected or shunned, and I buried my discomfort deep inside. This tiny little girl was already showing signs of trauma, a deep need to bond with a stable masculine presence. I had seen the final results of this early fracturing in the women I had dated throughout my adolescence, my twenties, before I knew what it was that I was observing; the damage of seminal disunion.

At Sabrina's house for holiday dinner, I considered the neglected fish tank in the corner of one bedroom, infested with runaway black mould. Trying to replace my judgement with compassion, as I didn't have all the details, I was left only to consider Justine’s inability (or willful choice) to not see these red flags. Driving home that night, from the far flung outskirts of town back into the city, while Justine delighted in the evening's events, I focused on route 26 unfolding in the dark, Justine...this is someone you look up to, have bonded with, and she's a mess; a string of dysfunctional men in her life, her daughter’s pair-bonding is so compromised she refers to total-strangers like me as "Daddy" and tries to sit on my lap. I held my silence in this profound tragedy. It was not my place to pick her friends. I wanted to take care who was around my relationship, my eventual marriage. Human beings tend to want to justify their own situations by enabling others to make the same dysfunctional choices they themselves made. Without Justine's willingness to regard me as her partner, rather than her workhorse, I knew it was only a matter of time before Sabrina's influences were so invasive in our home dynamic, that to be married to Justine would feel like marrying a committee of lobbyists.

To co-habitate with someone and then set off on the mission of changing them is to fundamentally reject who they are. To position someone as the trouble in a relationship is to demand they solve problems from a fundamental latitude of rejection. It translates into the boardroom: there I am pitching a $30,000 spot while a storm of self-doubt ransacks my mind, but my girlfriend spends every night in bed at the bottom of a wine bottle because I just can’t seem to figure life out, so how the fuck am I supposed to sell you on my skills? To undermine someone at home is to undermine them in the world. They will be outpaced by those who have loving support at home. No one could dispute that Justine had worked hard to find a path in her new calling, that shouldn’t be taken away from her, but she had a loving, encouraging partner at home. Someone who made her life easier in what way he could.

"It's like comparing Earth gravity to Martian gravity," I told Mira over the phone, while sat on my car at the foot of 28L. She was commuting from London to Leeds, now two years married and very pregnant, "Justine's a government employee. Her salary is paid by the taxpayers. Unions and lobbying bodies protect her job. She doesn’t have to compete, so of course she’s got the illusion of doing well and being special. I’m in the private sector. I have to compete. We're not playing by the same rulebook."

"She's commenting on how much pain you seem to be in, and she's mad at you that you won't go to a GP."

"I don't have health insurance. I take full responsibility. I've been self employed for 13 out of 16 years. Until now, I have enjoyed spectacular health," I cleared my throat, "That may be changing."

"Right, and I'm lucky enough to at least have NHS–flawed as it is... Still happy you left?"

"Of course not, as if it was my choice. I don't belong here. Never have." An Airbus roared overhead, arcing for parts unknown, perhaps through a night and a day, to Mira's neck of the woods. "So what exactly is going on physically?" Mira and I enjoyed a casual familiarity, nothing off-limits.

"I'm shitting blood. It's hard for me to walk–I'm sucking down painkillers constantly to do this wine job. It hurts when I come. When I look between my legs, I can tell one of my glutes– my right side– is swollen. There's something growing out of me. I'd told myself maybe it was a hemorrhoids, but I know that's me bullshitting myself."

"Jesus..." She let my declaration of predicaments hang in the air, I knew she'd sold the old Peugeot 504 years back, but I liked imagining her driving it anyway, tearing down the M1 in style, "Look, I don't agree with her browbeating you about it–there's no compassion in that, but she's not wrong. It might do to have yourself seen to. At the very least it will shut her up."

"I agree. She thinks it's cancer. I think she's exaggerating. She tends to exaggerate," I felt insulted and humiliated that I was portrayed as the only person in the relationship who had a problem. My heart waged a counter insurgency against what I perceived as her attempts to ameliorate her own insecurities by trying to fix me. If the prevailing narrative of the relationship was that I am the problem and I change, then everything wrong with the relationship will go away, then she has no influence in the relationship–no power. Simply untrue. The logical next step would be to do nothing. If I am taking no action and the problems persist then clearly I am not the cause. The cause is in the perception.

"That's as may be, but you are minimising her concerns. Until you have yourself looked at, and rule it out, she's well within her rights to drive herself up the wall believing it's cancer," If it was cancer then crisis was on the horizon. had not yet experienced how Justine handled a crisis. Perhaps I needed to before I could take the leap of building a life with her. The years before our relationship had been saturated with romantic false starts; situations where I was used for sex, money and validation. I was still raw, wanting so badly to be ready to take that leap. I rationalised away my uncertainty. In ignoring my doubt, I ignored my own alarm system. Dismissed the council of my inner generals.

"There's something else. Two years ago, when I had the near fatal asthma attack?"

"I remember,"

"I underestimated the signs there too. She has to be worried that history will repeat itself–retruamatization,"

"That's valid," I hear her signal on that distant highway, change lanes and accelerate, the hum of a BMW inline 6 engine graced my ears, just like my precious 325xi. Mira had always been a girl after my own heart, "Corey, I'm going to ask you a question and I frankly don't care if it pisses you off–"

"Shoot."

"Why are you doing this to yourself? You blow off your own health, and I get it we're all strung out with obligations. Maybe you can do that when it's just you and there's no collateral damage, but..." She trailed off, but I followed the through-line of her question. In the abstract there was a feeling of being dehumanized, reduced to economic units. Women had their own experience of this, but the things demanded of us as men were simultaneously beaten out of us by the prevailing culture. The only avenue left in that environment is the inner landscape—self attack and apocalyptic inner wastes ensue. In the realm of the personal it was far simpler. I felt the last supports that held shut my inner floodgates finally buckle, surrendering to the inevitable.

"Mira...I feel like I can't win at life. I feel like my hard work goes ignored while others coast by on their charisma and pedigree. I don't feel seen. Where is my tribe? To make matters worse, every morning I wake next to a woman who doesn't desire me anymore, who won't touch me," I thought of fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain, photos of their wives and sweethearts taped to the instrument panels of their Spits; always in sight and always with them. A man needed something to remind him of what he was fighting for. Not some abstract like God, Duty, King or Country, but the bodily safety of his sweetheart and family, and ultimately his sweetheart's admiration and respect. To loose that was to lose everything, "who tells me she won't have sex with me because she doesn't want me bleeding on her and the only means I have right now of fixing this problem, is to violate my own principles. It is not enough for me to live a life of base mammalian needs! I'm striving for more than that! When you just want to live consistently with your own values and someone is trying to pull you away from those values to satisfy their own needs, that is the initiation of force and is immoral. In that space you are not having a relationship, you’re not having intimacy, you are engaged in fending off a manipulation!"

"I get that your principles matter to you, but what good are they to anyone if you die of cancer?"

"The only way I can get health care in my current humiliating situation, is to go on public assistance. That violates every principle I have. I will never hear the end of it! Every argument I ever make for personal responsibility, philosophy, small-“L” libertarianism, Justine will always be able to say 'but you took medicare,' as a way to cut me down. I don't want to hand over my soul like that, Mira!"

"So you're essentially willing to lay down your life because you can't bear the thought that, as much as she's fucked you off and despotised you, as overbearing and arrogant, and insufferable as she's been, she just might be right–even though she's been a cunt-on-a-stick in presenting her case?"

Check and mate, I buried my face in my hands, pushed air through my teeth.

"Granted sometimes a cunt is what's needed and not always in the way we'd like... keeping with the theme of genital insults, stop being a perfect bell-end and get yourself seen to.

"That's why you're one of my oldest friends, Mira. You're absolutely right, God help me." What if there’s a way I can accept that I am a problem in terms that I can live with and utilise to empower me? Not because I agreed with Justine's assessments but because I had to take some action for myself?

"You bloody well should've married me. You're a complete idiot, but you're my idiot and I'm going to keep you alive if it kills me! As for Justine, tell her I said, if she's right about the cancer–and the jury's still out on that–she should savor her pound of flesh in silence, no gloating. She should ask herself if being right is more valuable to her than being a loving partner. I appreciate that she claims to care about your well-being, but she's too old to be such a cunt. She's lucky to have you and If she keeps it up she'll drive you off and cats will feast on her eyeballs," Mira's Balkan spirit hadn't been cooled much by Blighty.

"Anything else?"

"No, dear. Baby needs a Mars Bar. The next time I hear from you, you'll have a doctor's visit penned into the calendar, yes?"

"I will."

The waiting room at the Urgent Care provided a cooling sanctuary from the late Summer heat. I no longer gave myself days off, my finances were thinning, but I had insurance. I had spent the morning delivering food, the pain in my backside becoming so unbearable, that I hit my daily maximum of Naproxen before noon.

"Corey Drayton?" I rose at the nurse's call, thankful to be relieved of the sharp pain sitting caused. I followed her back to an exam room, submitted to weighing and the taking of vitals, "The doctor will be with you in just a moment." She left me in the sterile quiet of the room, awkwardly hovering my right side over the chair, having only just now returned to a non-pain baseline. A knock at the door, and a 40-something man entered, the light skipping over his salt dusted hair. He reached out with one hand, which I grasped in a firm handshake.

"Doctor Chapman," We nodded a gentleman's greeting, I returned to my hovering above the seat. "What's going on?" I described all of my symptoms; the blood, the smell, the pain, the sense of pressure, the oddly pinched ejaculations, the strange lacerated blood leaking flesh protruding my anus. He nodded hanging on my every word, grimacing sympathetically as I laid it all down. "That all sounds very difficult and I'm sorry you've been dealing with that. Corey, what I think would be best at the point would be for me to take a look," he held up his finger, I'm going to administer a digital rectal exam, It may feel a little uncomfortable,” whenever a doctor says that something may feel a certain way, it’s a guarantee.

"Whatever you need to do, doctor. I'm prepared,” I'd never had another man’s finger in my ass. Never had anyone’s finger in my ass, for that matter. I wasn’t sure who to feel more more sorry for; myself or the doctor. He handed me a sterile blanket and a hospital gown.

"Go ahead and change into this. You'll lay on your left side, with your right leg crossed over your left, as far as you can get it. Put this towel over you and I'll be back shortly, ok?"

He left. I did as instructed, stripping down my clothes, my jeans fitting loosely than they should have, by belt cinched al the way to that last hole. I saw myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror; wasted. I climbed onto the bed, and assumed the position. Another knock at the door, the doctor entered.

"How're we doin'?" My back was to him, I heard the snap of latex, hoped he would be using lube.

"I'm ready as I'll ever be,” I felt him roll up on me with a rolling stool, felt his breath on the backs of my legs, a cold, greasy latex finger spreading my ass, the finger sliding in, circling around. It was quicker than I expected.

"Okay. You can sit up now,” I did, slightly sore in a different way, “I saw what you were referring to, there is blood and lacerations, but what you have is an anal fissure. It's very common. Do you practise anal sex?"

"No, never," not that there's anything wrong with that. I had been propositioned, but never saw the appeal.

"The good news is that fissures can resolve on their own, and typically don't require surgery. I'm going to refer you to a gastroenterologist, he'll get you sorted out, ok?"

"Ok," All this sturm und drang over nothing. I've dodged a huge bullet with this one. I'm going to be ok.

"In the meantime, I'll prescribe you a lidocaine topical for the pain. You're gonna be fine."

"Thanks, Doc."

Minutes later I sat in my car, pain shooting up my back, relieved.

"It's not ass cancer," I told Justine, "Just an anal fissure. They referred me to a gastroenterologist who'll take over. Probably won't even need surgery."

"That's good, boyfriend! I am so glad, I was sure it was Cancer. I'm so relieved!" Vindication. Worth its weight in gold in the combat our relationship had been of late. The doctor's assessment in hand, I returned to bad old habits; pushing too hard, hoping that I could pass some Event Horizon smoother sailing beyond. Trust but verify. Where verification cannot be obtained, trust is as reliable as blind faith. High on the narrative I sold myself, naked before the carnage of inner deception, I mushed on, gloriously misinformed.