Today’s brief flurry of activity went pretty much how I expected. My dad’s doctor seems to think he’s deaf and talked to him, this time, the way people talk to the very young or the very old or people who don’t speak the language as though saying it slower and louder makes it all more comprehensible.
My attorney didn’t keep me waiting more than a few minutes. I realized something today that, at bare minimum, would have kept me from being angry at the attorney’s offices; They’ve really never dealt with someone like Sunny in either their professional or personal lives. It wasn’t just due diligence, they really couldn’t believe anyone could not be interested in their own divorce. I didn’t imagine my attorney could possibly be that --- I don’t know, sheltered? --- Seems like I’ve known Sunny’s all my life, God knows if it’s all the same I’d just as soon default myself, I mean if my inaction doesn’t affect anyone else.
Dawns on me the famous Bill Murray pep talk from that stupid kid’s camp movie “ It just doesn’t matter” meant something else to people like my attorney, that the speech was so ludicrous, so out of character for anyone to imagine saying that it was funny in a surreal way. It was funny to me because I could see myself telling kids that.
Which brings me to today’s object lesson; Gallows humor should be reserved for either Gallows or friends. I told three jokes in a row to my attorney today, they were in context, and he was only half listening so he gave me the sympathetic eyebrows instead of laughter or shock. I was trying to mitigate a bit of the horror of the answer to a direct question, and, because we were talking about Sunny I had this joke that a friend of hers loved and one we used to use as social workers to vet certain community workers. As a vetting technique a female had to tell the joke;
Q. What do you say to a woman with two black eyes?
A. Nothing, someone already tried to tell her twice.
Wince as you might in my profession it was a way of debriefing the daily horrors and of telling what to expect from the worker at a battered woman’s shelter where the mother of the kids in our custody was staying. It’s not a joke you expect laughter from, but it does cut to the chase of how formal you need to be with the worker. If I told it I’d be accused of trying to intimidate, a female worker, worst case scenario, would be accused of poor taste. Eight times out of ten it loosened up the meeting. Today it got me those distracted sympathetic eyebrows. I said something about eating snack dogs and red headed step children too.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a criticism, or, if it is it’s a criticism of me. My only expectation of him is that he performs the service he was hired for. I don’t expect him to laugh at my very old and not funny jokes, or stand up for me at my kids bris (oh sweet circumcised Jesus, may that never be an issue again. One of the very few poems I’ve had published was about my incompetence at having a bris for my son).
The radio station in the lobby played the exact same songs as it did when I was a kid. Among the Clapton and Bob Segar they played CSNY’s Suite Judy Blue Eyes. When I was activated for basic training my buddy was this surfer kid from around Mission Viejo who had joined to be a boat mechanic. His bored Cat IV skill was knowing the Spanish part at the end of the song. A Cat IV meant; it’s too fucking hot. The joke from the DI’s was they’d get in trouble for destroying government property if we did our silly parade shit during a cat IV. Given that it was summer in South Carolina it happened often enough where we needed to entertain ourselves for hours. The surfer didn’t speak Spanish he just had heard the song often enough he knew the sounds.
The attorney was hell bent on going through an inventory of kids and property we didn’t have; at about five questions in I said that anything that could be answered with a ‘we keep what we have in our possession’ should be and reminded him once again how many opportunities had been given for her to contest, and, once again how I had told him back in March that she wouldn’t. That was the point where I figured out that there was no hidden agenda or laziness, he just couldn’t imagine anyone would do that.
He asked the same question he always does and, honestly, I think the reason he wasn’t hearing my stupid gallows humor was the depth of my answer sunk in;
Q. Why would she just not respond?
A. Heroin.
For some reason he understood that this time. I’m thinking he doesn’t know any junkies either. Heroin doesn’t inherently inhibit litigation, and sunny was always like that even when she was afraid of taking an aspirin. I don’t think he believed me that she has never filed a tax return. I really think that in his head it’s filed as ‘One of those things’. I’m thinking everybody has that file and nobody quite gets anyone else’s file.
Apologies if I haven’t returned notes or if I wind up being late or early for something. I’m shoe gazing. If I do a flash Friday I’ll probably shoot for something cathartic in an abstract sort of way. Oh, I guess maybe I should link suite Judy blue eyes, yeah?
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