Did we meet at a club or a bar? I don’t remember, and I was well under 21 so technically I shouldn't have been in either one of them. I got away with a lot when I was young and cute. I have no idea what his last name was and, come to think of it, I didn’t know what his real first name was, either. I just knew him as Skeeter. He played guitar (duh), had long shiny hair and very smooth skin and claimed to be half Cherokee, which was possible but also very trendy at the time so maybe not. Skeeter, possibly part Cherokee, said he lived in a log cabin off Highway 9 in Northern California (which sounded very romantic) and I met him at a club or a bar in Santa Barbara. Maybe it was Los Angeles. Don’t exactly remember that either.
What I do remember is that after we spent all of one night together, I packed up my Australian sheepdog and my portable typewriter and my heated rollers (curling irons were not yet a thing) and drove my racing green 1968 Mercury Cougar up to Highway 9 to find him. I’m pretty sure he had not even given me his phone number.
What was I thinking? That this was some kind of a rom-com Grand Gesture? Did I imagine he would appreciate a high-maintenance houseguest? Believe that we were fated to move in together after one magical night? Convince myself that if he only spent more time with me, he would come to love me? I don’t know what I was thinking. I was probably high, and I was definitely insane.
Here’s the amazing thing. I did find him. Highway 9 was a rural road back then, and there weren’t that many long-haired Native American-looking guitar players who lived in log cabins and, like I said, I got away with a lot when I was young and cute. He was perplexed but not actually unhappy to see me. I remember hanging out for a few days, meeting his equally-perplexed friends, cooking his food, having a lot of sex…. my dog scratched the hell out of a wooden door, for which I owe an amends. I’m lucky he didn’t have a girlfriend up there, because then I’d owe her an amends, too.
Last column I joked about the guys who find crazy girls hot. We may be that, but never forget that we are also crazy. I’m lucky I survived myself.
I hadn’t thought about Skeeter in decades. The memory surfaced when I was writing inventory on “the most insane things you did when you were controlling, fixing or obsessing.” Blame Alanon. Some other colorful memories that came up included loaning a friend the money to pay his rent… when I was his landlord. I was loaning him money to pay rent to me. And then there was my attempt to control my cocaine use by buying an eight-ball and sealing a gram of it in an envelope and mailing it back to myself, thereby spacing out my drug use… and, at the same time, turning a state crime into a federal one. (The statute of limitations has long since passed, in case you are worried about me saying that out loud.)
These strategies were all courtesy of brain that earned a summa cum laude bachelor’s degree at the age of 19. I really thought I was outsmarting… the system? You? Myself?
The 12 Steps talk about being restored to sanity. I’ve been on the path of recovery for a long time, and the restoration seems to have worked. Most of the time, I’m pretty sane, and I have a support system that lets me know when I’m not. Sometimes I forget how insane it really got. Just like I forget if it was a club or a bar, or Los Angeles or Santa Barbara. It’s good for me to put pen to paper and see what comes up, then share it with another person (in this case, bunch of other persons) and turn it over to the universe. The 12 Steps talk about that part, too.
Some people have a different opinion than I do about love addiction being a “chronic and relapsing brain disease characterized by the obsessive and compulsive use of a mind-altering substance or behavior despite negative life consequences,” the same way that drug and alcohol addiction are. An allergy of the body, an obsession of the mind and a malady of the spirit, if you will. But in my experience, the same treatment modality appears to be effective.
As the old timers put it: If the cure works, maybe you had the disease.