I have an outline, it holds together. It’s going to change, but it holds together as a document when it’s about me waking up to this situation — and I’m 100% positive that everyone is going to wonder if it was true or not. So to my friends—f you. The story didn’t change, it just landed.
I’m going to keep reading it because the last 1/3 isn’t dramatic enough, I mean as a twist, because we’re going to have to get strapped into a roller coaster ride that I wasn’t expecting to be on. So I’ll leave that be a moment, but I think it ends on the lambada parties, so I can move through the Jewish household, how we honored tragedies in the next room, so in one house, there was everything. Even “Building up a Mystery,” one of Nicole’s favorite cuing Jose to become the hilarious jerk that he was, “you come out of night,” to disconnected the stereo, cuing five women, Angelica the hottest, to scream JOSE! She stomped her kitten heel… She rolled up a piece of paper to hit him across this room, as a group of people, intuitively timed, Jews in there, advance on the living room dance floor. It was miraculous these nights, and the Jews were the most amazed, they watched them as if they really were, a miracle, even if they didn’t totally belong. The unbelievable can happen to you. Why was I the most unbelievable of them all? I don’t know.
What we don’t see, thinking of Dr. J. Her eyes like a white out, the most innocent of them all.
Now I have to clarify the — shock of, she decides it’s not true about him based on nothing… the reader is going to be on that page, like, wait, what? She decided, it wasn’t true, why? So maybe the spectacles we put on for him will keep moving around, as that scene might be a big picture point, as I’m seeing that scene speaking for itself, as the whole thing was a spectacle, glorious, Jose Leibowitz the theater director of my dreams, beginning to take the task, a fiction now, of bringing these spectacles for the child molester to the heights of art, craft, turning around us in his sports gear, “meaning.” His nephew his assistant. That might transition into the lambada parties nicely, transcendence, it was about sex.
“It wasn’t true was it?”
Shaking her hand, she wasn’t too sure about how my mother handled me?
I don’t know what the ending is, exactly, not yet. I wanted the dance and the tennis players to formally play off one another, so maybe I’ll communicate what I just expressed at the club as I have a scene of finally getting there, walking through the club, older now. Maybe I’ll have a final showdown with Angelica, and the lambada was a dance of liberation… from oppression, because sex — it became about so much more — JOSE LEIBOWITZ appearing on the living room dance floor — it was the force, life. And for me, personally, it was rage. The WHOLE thing fell on me — and under the pressure of — was this true?! I was going to collapse, so she was like a Bowser I had to defeat in a video game.
I don’t know how to totally go about it, yet, so I’ll keep reading and not writing…? I think. Not touching it yet. Just thinking about the pieces, because what is the story, in this case? If I stay at the parties, it sounds somewhat delusional, but there is delusion in the real world, you see, it’s in the structure. But, in terms of my undercover investigation? I mean, from the position of memoir? A position of growing up? Even wanting to become a mother? I had to roar. Was that TRUE?
It’s the type of story that silences most, it’s the sneakers on the court, where you hang back and watch.
The whole thing fell on me, I almost collapsed. I had to roar — Serena Williams’ FIST, so that feels more in line with “the game.” Being shut down by everyone I know, when I already came from that story, and it didn’t exactly change. I don’t know if I want to be ethereal about this, this was the power ballad, Celine Dion, The Power of Love, people, the lambada, but for the purposes of this, no one is listening to music, it was the lambada regardless of the song… so let that live and be, maybe. It was a mess, it was so many songs, the Sound of Music.
I’m going to reread it for a minute, staring at notecards again, but it holds together, at least. I’m not going to write because I don’t know what the whole thing looks like yet, so why would I work on sections, I already did. I’m going to keep figuring it out step by step. And the end will clarify itself. I know it’s like, “did this happen to her?” And in the end, it’s going to be, “did this happen to me?” I’ll keep refining that, like, did this happen to me? YES, it did, for one, and the whole thing is going to fall on me, and maybe under that pressure there was only one way out — and that was rage. That was love, actually. Someone would might roar for me, and there was no one there, you see, people wanting to fluff this up as if I had gotten into an argument. If my child was in this situation, I would roar, for sure. I don’t know if I would play “wiseman.” As if the COPS or social services — wouldn’t have been called…
But I feel good about it, at least, it’s holding together.