I’ve structured out the beginning — it stays. I’m not bringing in the lambada. I’m not bringing in the love songs, her living in a state of dance. I’m going to reserve that, maybe for the end, not so sure, but I had to make meaning out of a story like that, and the lambada is a dance famously if not infamously about sex. And they’re Jewish too, so we honored Jewish holidays too in the same house. It was about everything— people thought this was unbelievable, when human history is packed with tragedy and catastrophe and terrible acts. And there I was, a symbol of child abuse, in some insane lie? Which…? The Jews know. They were killed as children. Anne Frank. What was I supposed to do with that? Just how unbelievable this story was to people, while dancing the lambada, which is about sex, so it became so deep, about the whole human experience. What do you do with what can happen to a person? Even young? That feels more like a conclusion, or a thought that comes later.
I’m just having her come to my house first. I’m not bringing in the song and dance yet. In general, I’m finding, I think, that I try to do too much too quickly.
On the way to my house, I have her looking over her shoulder — needing to switch lanes — that’s the metaphor for psychological structure, and that’s what fascinated me the most, the existence of it. She had a frame of reference. She has a world that’s traveling through the universe. She knew child abuse existed out there, but never in a MILLION YEARS — and people exaggerate, to bring in a META point about DR. J’s psychology as she was a walking exaggeration — did she expect this to come into hers. So will she be able to even SEE it? NOT in her structure. Not in HER world concept.
There’s a reason why self-defense classes begin with tackling your shock response. You can’t freeze. People might not totally understand how they might react, in reality. Your MIND is another topic in these cases.
“Can you imagine?” She tapped her temple at me dramatically. She couldn’t imagine it, but at the same time, she knows and readily believes, “real tears,” my mother cried “real tears,” she insisted.
I get it. But a man can do this, it’s mythical, even, or maybe I should speak to the existence of a collective. I saw that was a real idea. There’s a collective, more than one. We know it happens. It wasn’t THAT unbelievable that a FATHER could molest if not RAPE his own FOUR YEAR OLD daughter. Forget the tears—you see what I’m saying? So she shows me, this can happen? Okay. Keep going. I had to conclude when I was four that my mother might have been a victim of sexual abuse maybe younger than my age. I was aware of what rape was, conceptually, at that time, and Angelica has communicated to me, basically, that this happens. It can happen to someone so young.
It’s just to introduce that this woman is going to get — IMPACTED, something’s coming out of the blind spot that’s going to be a touch too real or apparent.
So I left off, in my last post, when Angelica gets to my house, and Dr. J walks down the steps.
I tend to get mixed up here.
The reader doesn’t know that, originally, the story was that my mother lied that my father was a child abuser. It’s not going to LOOK good when we get there…WHY Angelica decided it wasn’t true, but that’s the original story that I’m going to question later. Whether or not it was a lie. My parents aren’t in the picture yet, which is good. We just know I’m asking her to tell me the story of what happened.
However, I don’t know if I should mention, as I did, that I’m wondering if this really happened to Dr. J, once upon a time? Angelica is telling me: yes, it can happen, this she knows…and I was eight, nine years old, going, I guess so. I guess this can happen.
She comes into my house, and she’s alerted upon entry. She took ONE step, froze, and THEN TURNED and saw me. She felt it, and she was amazed herself. “I am from BRAZIL.” A joke. A hot blooded woman who felt something was wrong the second she stepped into my house.
Once Dr. J comes down the steps, it gets muddled, because her husband’s best friend asked her to do him a favor and pick up his tax return, and it’s going to turn out —that this guy was one of Dr. J’s lovers, which I find out later, in reality, and it’s going to be funny, because he hated ME, you see, because I was her daughter, a piece of shit that he “fucked.” That’s my mother to him. His name is Fat Alan. I don’t know if I should mention it yet. “You didn’t know her?” Not at all. “Never met me.” I’ll stick to the basics.
“I could have been ANYONE,” she shivered. And the FEAR is always sex, child abduction, doesn’t matter WHERE you are. It’s just to say. It’s one of these examples to point out what I mean about PEOPLE — THIS story was impossible to people, it could not have happened, but there’s a child rapist everywhere, no matter where you go… right? That’s a collective fear. One that might be too true, so it was fascinating to me that people acted like this was impossible when there are child abusers if not murderers waiting in the wings of every nation. Truly speaking.
Lots of fear around sex. Got the picture. Please continue. I was nine. Angelica Leibowitz and I had been discussing sex openly since I was four. But she’s not acting fearful around it, which I appreciated. It wasn’t necessarily “polluting” to a child, in the same way that adults seem to have an innate fear that a child is going to get “ideas,” like, they can’t resist urges to be “bad.” I don’t get that. And here, to add this, though I don’t know what to do with it yet — I saw, in children my age, meanness. I saw that, for example, I knew Santa Claus wasn’t real. That was never going to work on me. I didn’t even totally get WHY it had to be literally true. But I would never ruin it for another child, I got the picture. That kids sometimes act meanly, that kids can be mean…and it’s innocent. Innocence does not = benevolence. (And, in looking at children, I am seeing a developmental problem…)
The fear around sex hurt me, it did. I’m four, but I know I came from sex, no? Is this secret? I didn’t understand it. I was so confused, really, around the subject of sex, thinking about Dr. J’s lunacy.
I’m seeing truth in her, in other words. Is it really crazy, Dr. J?
Anyway, she comes down the steps. I’ll move her description along… as she was a person who merited being analyzed, but I won’t get caught up. I’ll develop it later.
They were standing next to tea cup sets on pedestals. A mad hatter, Dr. J, for real. She acted as if she were on mercury. One of these details, where you go, really? Just because she was so “on the nose.” Her storytelling was EXTREMELY CLEAR, too clear, like her eyes. She arranged collectible tea cup sets on pedestals. An Alice in Wonderland character. She would definitely be at the mad hatter tea party.
So, the first words out of Dr. J’s mouth disturbed Angelica, (I’m laughing), which brings in point one: my mother was visibly strange.
“HERE TAKE HER!” Wee! Dr. J pops like a Jack in the Box, with confetti flying, that’s what she did, and that imagery landed with Angelica. She threw me onto her in a state of extreme joy.
“What did you think?”
“Was she joking?”
You never knew with Dr. J. You had no idea. She appeared to not possess distinctions between lie and truth, like she was one mad universe, or the MEDIA. No one really trusts the media, depends, but everyone speaks as if they know the truth. THEY have an agenda but not my media. The aliens are here, a former member of the military is making his rounds on podcasts about it, Minhaj’s emotional truth. Dr. J is — dee dee dee — speaking right, left, literally, skipping down the middle, sticking ONE foot OUT, one foot IN, you see? “Cha cha real smooth,” Casper Slide Part Two. “Let’s go to work,” and she’s clapping her hands like a monkey with cymbals. She appeared to crack on a particular line. And she’s going to crack her dazzling smile… she’s not reflecting a lie, in fact, if you catch my drift. Can you always tell when someone is joking, being serious, telling you the truth? People change their stories.
So here I get lost in telling this story.
I’m investigating child abuse, so this has to reveal something, or be leading the reader towards some point about it, which is, to think about out: “can you imagine someone lying about that?” Angelica said.
But YOU the reader might not know enough yet, maybe, like, wait what? She lied? So it’s not true about your father? Maybe that’s a good twist early on? Or point of confusion.
“Imagine someone lying about something like that? About your own husband?”
“But isn’t it already a lie?” In a home where sexual abuse is happening, as I sincerely wondered if she came out of one of these homes, wouldn’t you have to lie? Wouldn’t it require lying? You must lie.
The only thing my father knew about my mother was that, she was shipped around to different family members for the first ten years of her life, beginning when she was two, because her sister beat her. Was that a lie? A cover up? True?
I couldn’t help but remark that I just got “sent away” for a few years, as if this present situation held fragments of her real past.
Where did this woman come from?
I don’t know if I should do a scene where my aunt and uncle tell me that they had to leave her family house the next day, because it was “too creepy.” You see what I mean? RIGHT out of the gate, I’m expecting CREEPY just as she projected right away. That’s what I mean. I’m seeing the truth. I’m seeing reflections of it.
Dr. J = creepy, not in a few convos. My aunt and uncle walked into her family’s house: “creepy,” first word. Now picture me, a newborn, unable to leave. My father let me go home with her, although she told him that she was getting beaten at the age of two, and zero is too close to two. I would not be sending my newborn home with her…
So here are the notecards I’m staring at right now based on what I just started to unpack:
HERE TAKE HER! Weeeee! Dr. J’s personality was brighter than bright. So how does that relate to child abuse? Is it BRIGHT, Dr. J? Like, Margaret Atwood said recently in the NYtimes, that “very very likely” we’re all getting abused… molested, literally. We have to assume that we’re all going to get molested — and is that true? That old question. You see? The crack we are on, with Dr. J? Regardless, what is happening? You see what I’m saying? What are we SAYING? Isn’t that cause for concern? Just the statement? That we’re all getting molested?
I saw that in her, long ago, these qualities.
To bring in an example: when I said it was a lie, I heard without fail, “was it?” And then, when I asked that question, it was “no no…” basically. This what I mean about her basic condition. Is it true? Not true? Can it exist? Only if it IS a lie? A subject that seems to be confusing for people. Where, truly, when I said it was a lie, people wondered if it wasn’t a lie, but then, when I was a real mess, as I reopened these years as an adult, and I had to ask myself that question—no one gave me a chance at all. It was basically as if I hadn’t said that. Like, it wasn’t serious, like I had no right to ask that question.
“She believed her own lies,” my father said. But so did he. So did Fox News when they said Obama wasn’t a citizen of the United States. They knew that wasn’t true, but they acted like it was. Fake news MUST have fact checkers, but the real news doesn’t have to…
This is where I don’t know what to do next.
Mirror mirror mirrors? Like are you following me? Where I go into her universe of mirrors? She reflected the truth. Mirrors were one of her symbols. I could go into her accosting the priest every sunday with her rapes, which was a shocking performance, but she’s reflecting a billion dollar lawsuit that was BRIGHT, like people knew it was happening, but they were ignoring it. For years. Which performance is more outrageous? Normal? Or spectacular?
The ONLY way she could be THAT happy? Angelica Leibowitz leveled with me, is if she made love recently, just before she came down the stairs… and did she get her mind too blown? What did that even mean in her case? Why did she act like that?
“Well she could have…” I said, as she slept with her clients upstairs, often, and so, there’s her legendary sexual behavior. You can’t talk about Dr. J without addressing her sexual behavior.
When we left that day, my mother’s cherry red mercedes was parked out front. I have a picture of me at four years old not knowing what to do with her license plate: IRSHELP. She’s getting pulled over for drinking, driving, and looking for sex downtown in that vehicle, as a tax expert, a genius. Her limo pulled up, her solution to her problem, or simply, wee! Time to move up in the world. She was only chaffeured around in limosuines, another lover in the driver’s seat, Michel, “him too, Maria!” Angelica said. And the black tinted windows reflected the sky the color of her eyes… that’s the central relationship in Dr. J, where the light became dark, the dark became light. We tend to think of the path of the villain as a fall from grace…but JOY showed another way was possible, up up up into the sky the color of her eyes…
I don’t know the steps yet, how to order these ideas, but we’re dealing with a reversal of concept, and yes, it’s disconnection, the BUTTON word of today. That’s what Dr. J symbolizes. It’s a disconnection from earth, as Dr. J didn’t want to come from Earth, with all our basely normal desires, regular old, real life. It’s the age of BENDING reality, manifestating, etc. Not to say it’s not true, like you don’t make it happen in your life. She was even TikTok, flawless, ageless, for a while. Like you could put TikTok hearts around her… and everyone says, everything is disconnected now, which is another one of these statements—is it? Is it all disconnected? She’s of this universe, one that still believes that our nature is “bad,” when she would invite us to think about the integration of shadow and light, and that the bad guys might just be the good guys. Like, I heard that a friend of mine wanted to “ascend.” He wanted to leave this earthly existence, in a sense, when there’s nothing dirty or un-evolved about the earth. Why leave earth? There’s a need to focus on the word “sacredness.” But that’s a digression, but I’m seeking to work out my analysis of her.
I know central storytelling points include: did this happen to her once upon a time? And, she reflected the truth… that’s my working hypothesis.
I’m taking in the club, as it would have made a great stage for hell, as the terracotta deck, bright red, baked so hot under the sun, it burned your feet right off, you couldn’t walk barefoot. She made acutely aware of light and dark, heaven and hell as psychological concepts. There would be bright spots in hell, wouldn’t there be? Was that a quality of it? Not so much DARK, is this… bright? Like it’s happening right in front of everyone? You see what I mean?
“Very very likely, everyone is getting abused…” And, to skip ahead, Trump won’t release the full files on Epstein. With situations, scandals, like these: you expose. That’s what you do. You abused children, you massacred people… there are shades of darkness that are TOO BRIGHT to keep in the dark. Like, even looking at this picture with one of the girls Epstein trafficked with the former prince Andrew…Ghislane in the back, smiling for the shot. A little Dr. J.
That’s what I’m seeing in Dr. J. My feet dangling. “Huh.” It was all…so fascinating… as if I were “a dark character” turning the lens on the light as we’re dealing with a reversal of concept. Not a spot of darkness within Dr. J. She’s DISNEY. A buffoon. A picture-perfect grotesque, specifically, which should bring to mind the cosmetic enhancements of today — a different kind of monster. THAT’s the woman in the driver’s seat. (It’s not to critique aesthetics… )
This section is complicated, because I don’t know if all of this is interesting BEFORE we even get to the scandal.
But, “you’d think?” I’m tossing a paper towel into the bin of bathroom at the BH Tennis Club in a shady corner… staring at the magnolia tree, or gardenia. It’s about our nature, Dr. J, I get that, something twisted about our ideas about all this… but you’d think, you’d think that “a man is raping a four year old,” would be an automatic goodbye. Not a “here’s 11k a month while I figure it out…” like, “we loved each other once…” sounds a little DISNEY. The knee jerk reaction SHOULD BE— I need to get HELP. That’s NOT what happens, it seems, does it Dr. J? I read later that most of the time families pretend like it didn’t happen — I saw that. Lies. Do people not respond? It’s just to say I’m SEEING child abuse as a DISNEY routine, Dr. J. Is it rated PG, if not G? I was amazed. How?
Like, someone told me after Thanksgiving, casually, that her aunt told her that one of family members present at Thanksgiving exposed himself to her daughter, and “whatever.” And it’s like, I’m sorry? Did you hear what you just said? I was in another situation where the husband had sexual problems that were never faced, and he ended up giving me EYES, you see, out the window of a car. And I swear, I watched this woman run to the front seat to like, protect me from this? The mother is totally checked out. I’m going, to WHAT point does it need to GET, before someone takes real action? I’m seeing it IN Dr. J.
It’s mentally ill, for sure.
In terms of the story, this is what I have, first.
I have Joy calling Angelica every day… she’s keeping her close. I asked her to describe these phone calls, and I can start to describe her in more detail here. Like maybe I should push ahead in the narrative instead of getting caught up in my analysis of Dr. J. That’s what I don’t know, because she only came down the steps… of my house… and we haven’t gotten to the actual situation yet.
But the two storytelling points right now is: did this happen to her? And did this present situation reflect the truth of it? And the thing I found even more compelling — didn’t matter it was true, it still reflected the truth, I thought. Which is what the mirror mirror mirrors on the wall reflects — her spectacular performance for the priest. It’s happening a lot. And no one is going to do anything about it. It’s like the eucharist minister spoke as if — who cares? I mean, me? If a woman was accosting my priest with rapes, I would confront. I would suggest we get some help. Confront. But that’s not what happens. Sex is a bit too serious a subject to treat casually, to make another point about IT not being WRONG. It should be respected, however, as a subject, even given how much rape there’s been in the world! This is an act to be respected. Sexual violence is even an instrument of war. “We rape the women.”
So she calls every day, she’s keeping her close. Did she KNOW what she was doing? Bringing in her BLANK state eyes of SHEER innocence? People asked me that. Do you? Do you know what you do? It’s a question Jesus answered—no. “They know not what they do.” That’s supposed to be a cue to US, the listeners, to REFLECT on what we do, but but they do but they don’t. In a court of law, for the most part, they don’t care. Not unless it was so crazy… like someone killed someone because the elves told him that she would ascend to heaven, or something bonkers, or so I heard over Thanksgiving.
Now, to bring back in Eric Berne, a transactional psychologist that wrote a famous book called The Games People Play — this phone call smells of a game…she’s calling her every day, and it’s pretty clear that she’s not asking for me, as if she were even trying to communicate that to me. I was four and aware that it was her. I peeked around the wall, what is this woman doing? Which was Angelica’s thought. Now Berne believed the games we play reach back into our childhoods, so what is this game, Dr. J?
Then, the accusation gets launched, and Angelica decides to “play a nice game” anticipating that he might call and “act NICE.”
Maybe I should drive the narrative to the game, and then begin to analyze her and wonder if this really happened to her, once upon a time, and it’s part of the reason why she’s so messed up. In that, there was so much rape in Dr. J’s psyche. She’s running into church every Sunday and accosting the priest with her rapes. Every Sunday. She’s engaging in prostitution. She’s unhinged sexually. It was one big addiction with Dr. J.
I don’t know where to put these scenes:
At four, in church, I was contemplating “pure regards.” I had to conclude at four, that she might have been abused younger than my age. I knew what rape was, conceptually, when I was four. I didn’t know the details, but it didn’t look good. It looked really really ugly. Dr. J has a “pure regard,” which was fascinating, because she was so impure, I got it, I just didn’t understand it. Why? I got that sex wasn’t pure to these people, the Catholics, but if I am pure, and I came from this act, why is it impure? I saw that sex was impure, in other words, I just didn’t understand the point of that as a pure person who came from that act…who’s going to get abused… now? Or could be?
I flipped out at my first tennis lesson because my instructor started singing “Maria” from Westside Story. You couldn’t sing me a love song when I was four, because I knew you could be raped, so I chucked my tennis racket at Mountaingate and caused a scene. Sure it was innocent, but my mother taught me that innocence doesn’t necessarily mean benevolence. So you can’t give me an innocent routine. Who isn’t? Dr. J was innocent to the point of buffoon. It was ridiculous. Never met anyone as INNOCENT as Dr. J. He was just singing a song, but I reacted because a grown man was singing me love songs. So I said, “I am FOUR…” maybe I was five, by then, I don’t know. “You cannot sing me love songs.” I am NOT the appropriate age.
I guess, here, I can say, “so my behavior, and my mother’s behavior convinced you it was true…” and she said “yes,” but she’s going to totally forget my father’s throughline. Erased it.