CHAPTER 25: Many Men of Conscience
From: The Saga of One F**ked Mother
“Many Men of Conscience” is Chapter 25 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother.
It’s MLKing Day ’89 and just a couple weeks before the first custody trial. Herry tells Legion all men lust after other women every day, so the divorce is her fault for being so puritan. Her father assures her accountable men, “men of conscience” do not. She realizes the marriage counseling was intended to accomplish this woman-blame. But Legion will not go along with this gaslighting—she’ll stand her ground and it will make her stronger. She also realizes the Spanish verb “aprovechar”, to take, can also mean to “swindle,” “to screw the hell out of” and that describes Herry perfectly—as the taker and screwer he is.
Being MLK Day, Legion recognizes that even MLKing, despite all his agitating for peace and freedom and equality, does not apply these principles to the most oppressed in society: women. In fact, he takes advantage of his own male prerogative.
This is the last chapter in Book 2. Book 3 begins with the first Family Court trial.
In the last chapter, Legion realizes she is not upset about divorcing Herry. He was not the love of her life, and his inability to care or connect on a level deeper than pure physical meant, in the end, he had always been just a sex object.
Legion remembers her youngest son at 22-years-old admitting that he not only did not remember his childhood before being taken away from her, but that he did not want to remember it. All those years of love and nurturing and fun—gone. This is an example of how cognitive dissonance causes kids to dissociate off memories of their mother, but they still exist in the subconscious. It is just too painful for children to remember, and hence feel again, the love and good times they had with mom. Perpetrators and their Family Court enablers take full advantage of this psychological survival mechanism in their agenda to maintain men’s control over their children.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic oppression and violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point [on the web page]. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page of Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday and subscribers will find them in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
TEASERS
I shall become hardened, steeled. A ring of steel around my finger, no longer a gold ring, a ring of steel around all of myself. Tougher and stronger than I had ever previously thought myself capable of … becoming!
That is the aprovechar insult to us four which AmTaham is helping me to stop you from taking from us. You cannot be around me and around my children and keep on taking from us our dignity and our integrity like that. So in the order of things that, … that … is why you are gone, Pillar of the Community Doctor Edinsmaier! You can have it all, the dissing, the disrespect and the disloyalty and the distrust and the disconnect – your unaccountability, Herry – but now? Now … you order it up from others. Not from us four. Not anymore.
CHAPTER 25
Many Men of Conscience
“PREDICTION: Many men of conscience will ally themselves publicly with a woman of feminist credentials. They may be living together or apart—it doesn’t matter; what matters is their public alliance. She will provide him with credentials of his own: a plastic‑laminated wallet card that says, ‘I have been approved by a feminist woman’ and it will have on it her good name. He will flash the card when it suits him. He will keep it in his pocket when he buys pornography. When he visits her home, he will leave a mess.”
—John Stoltenberg on such men in his Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, pp 182 & 183.
I’m a smart person, brilliant at times. Mirzah’s most intelligent, too. How does such a smart, smart person, only 22 years old, not remember anything more than a very, very few snippet moments out of the first half of that short, short two decades’ length of his lifetime?!
“… anything about my life before I was 11. I don’t.”
We women know that question’s answer. And the explanation to a second, inferred one also, “Why wouldn’t a person want to remember …?” We know the standard of that answer, too. O JYeah, that we do.
It is not as so many, many men and some teaching, teaching, always talking women alike would have you to believe. From the evidence that are the facts of history—and not the history written down and taught only from out the hands and mouths connected to the minds of males but from the corrected history of the World—from the evidence that are the facts, then, of the treatment of nation upon nation and individual family members upon each other within those nations down through millennium after millennium, it is certainly not about religiosity nor its studied absence.
As a matter of fact, I say that quite little study is necessary. Furthermore, no college degree, no fancy familial pedigree nor the classiest classist countenance is required to understand—and remedy—dehumanization either. When we were eight, we knew what to think, then what to do. By the time we are, all of us everywhere with the exception of child soldiers, eight years of age we know, in all choices and decisions that are of life‑altering consequence, what The Right Thing to do, to think, to say, to act as, to be … is. In any exercise of our wills then after that childhood point, in any that alters our or someone else’s life, we already know, before the action, the wake of it. Which is exactly why folks choose, rightly and wrongly, to go on ahead and, purposefully upon their wills, … act.
15 January 1989, I was standing in the Othello Drive foyer beside that closed, brown portal to the snowy front yard. Beside me stood another. It was Sunday, and that other one had just returned to me my children. Far earlier than I had expected in the last part of his weekend with them, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier brought the Truemaier Boys back around 1:30 that afternoon. I’m glad that I was at home for them to be able to come to, that I was even there. And had not myself been gone—gone off doing something of my own, that is ya’ know, gone out and away on “business” of my own.
Oftentimes I used to wonder what Herry so urgently had to do that he so, so wanted to be entirely free of the vestiges and visages of fatherly functions. But then my thinking would shortly become clear, especially now after the first of this new 1989 year with last month’s failed counseling theatrics and equally failed holiday therapy, “Why would he be any different—separated—than Herry had been when he was physically in the marriage? Gone. Separated from it—that is, the marriage. Separate. Escaped. That was all the same. Still.” Herry wasn’t off getting help somewhere last summer, not from anyone, to change himself. And, more than ever most certainly, not now either.
The Othello entrance is cramped so with swiftly gathering in all three of the Truemaier Boys from the wintry temperatures, I was physically forced solidly upside the ochre stone edging that, swinging around its corner and into the living room proper, becomes the fireplace frame. Passing by me Jesse, Mirzah and Zane quickly dispersed to the back, to their one and only, gothically leaden‑gray bedroom.
More on women’s answers about our memory loss suddenly emerged.
Brushing my upper right arm, butting it really as if attempting to diagnostically ballotte for a fetal calf or a floating kidney, thrusting his knuckled half‑fist hard into my deltoid a couple of times, maybe three even, I heard Dr. Herod Edinsmaier derisively screech yet quietly of course, softly enough so that only he and I—as was always Herry’s so humiliating and dehumanizing cruelty with me—would be able to hear his heartlessness, his rage, his violence, “You go on out there, Cunt. Go on. You go on out there and just try to find one. There isn’t a married man alive out there who doesn’t lust after other women every single day of his life. I’m tellin’ ya’, Twat, there isn’t one man. Not one. Single or married. You jus’ try to find one. Go on. Yoooou won’t.”
Ten days earlier on 05 January of that year, Herod Edinsmaier, the seventh of eleven, live‑born kiddos of rurally isolated Detanimod Edinsmaier and, of course, all of those babes spawned by Banished‑to‑the‑Milkhouse Sperm Source Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier, Fatlantic’s saints john and jude roman catholic lay priest, … Herod Edinsmaier marked, in his own way whatever that had been, his 43rd birthday.
What measure is this man … … this man to whom I was still married!?
I split. Immediately those kinds of words will do that to women. Immediately. So that I, Legion Two, was able to thank Herry for bringing me back my sons. Instead of vomiting. Which is what Legion One, the vulnerable and fragile, original core—I of the thing in the vestibule that was me and which existed somewhere choked and tamped down deep, deep inside Two, was doing.
Smirking of course, Herry Edinsmaier opened the door, swaggered out through it and fled. Gone off, with all manner of that routine snorting, sneering and sniggering of Herry’s, to his reality—evading pornography or out “to teach” yet another alcoholics anonymous “friend” or to whatever else brought him self‑centered and self‑aggrandizing escapism, I suppose. To do something of his own, that is—gone off and away on “business” of his own.
This short scenario and its date I have, as part of the initial question’s answer, mysteriously never forgotten. I cannot account for precisely when it was that AmTaham gave me such the wonderful apology gift that he did; but in contrast, I sure’s hell can recall this event of the exact middle of January. It is easy to remember: the braggadocio so typical of Herod Edinsmaier for one thing and the fact that, for another, on this specific date there is a second adult man’s birthday, thereby providing for a famous and instant connection. 15 January is, of course, the totally titled and allegedly reverent, nonviolent and peace‑bringing reverend doctor martin luther king’s calendar birthday, that date is. To remember when Herry visited this mess of vernacular upon me—again—with filliping his filth out and onto my humanness, all that I’ve ever had to do then is to hear that date. Then the link that this specific and supposedly renowned man’s birthday on it makes to “drop‑my‑pants‑and‑pop‑‘em‑right‑there‑on‑the‑spot” Herry and to the rapist mindset behind Dr. Edinsmaier’s mouth comes to me. Simple. By association.
Nonviolent, peace‑bringing, respectful, reverent, freedom‑loving, esteemed and now with a birthday as national holiday, literally really, really time‑honored, too. These are all adjectives that many, possibly even most persons, use to extol in verbal and written laud martin luther king, jr, but … in truth named Michael King at the time of and after his actual birthing. I ask, “Just how much peace and nonviolence, just how much esteem and respect, just how much honor did this male, one of the 47 percent who are the Entire Earth’s very, very clear MINority bring to me? By his free will to make life‑affirming choices in his behavior—or not—just exactly how free, by his choosing to go ahead and to act on that will of his … am I? He—king—blesses me exactly how?”
“But he didn’t work for you! He didn’t labor, suffer and die for you, White Girl! king did what he did for his people,” I hear all the time thrown back at me. And, … worse.
“Weeeell, of females then, for only the black ones did he march? Struggle for? Endeavor to deliver justice to? Or, more accurately, preach at? Only the black ones? Okaaaay.” Saffron—and sometimes silver—blonde that I surely am, I still am left thinking, “All of those trafficking, clitoris‑carving, acid‑tossing, stone‑hurtling, abortions‑forcing and “honor”‑murdering ‘godly’ tribesmen’s labors and sufferings and killings to bring upon us DEhumans esteem, reverence and peace? For our own sakes? Those acts are done for their peoples, their holiest humans including king tell us.”
That? That is holy work? Besides his own frequent and flagrant dissing‑philanderer wanderings and because of it, too, ml king did that wicked work also. By doing nothing to stop it for his people. By his doing nothing for us DEhumans who were his black people. Except maybe siding, solely however in philosophy and rhetoric, against the tribal abortions’ forcers—since in America at least, where a few––but only a very, very few black women––can access safe abortions and safe abortionists, king was anti‑abortion. For well over half of black people then—for well over the MAJority of black people then—the reverend doctor martin luther king, jr, did nothing. Nothing but bring down upon them absolutely no nonviolence, no peace, no reverence, no respect, no justice and, for sure, nooooo freedom. Freedom from any of that fear. Justice for any of those people’s sufferings and atrocities of war, terror, torture and tyranny. He, instead, perpetuated them.
And, we know why, we remember why, we DEhumans know why. It’s about humanization, about being a human being, a human. Who is and who so is not.
“But I’m white and of European descent. So, you say not those things to me then, because I’m white, you infer? So acts for me? Done to me?” I further examine. “Only those of folks of the same hues and ancestry as mine? Those of, say, perhaps bill clinton’s, fdr’s and jfk’s, thomas jefferson’s and benjamin franklin’s? And theirs, their acts of free will are somehow loftier and, of course, ‘none of my business’ since the peoples or the “blessings” directly involved are, are, … are what? Are white? Or, well, some of them, probably most of ‘em anyway, white? Or, as king’s? As was king’s DEhumanization of Females? Not known? Not broadcast anyhow and so kept by his closest, caretaking male colleagues who did know, … secret? Not known until, of course, they are. Until, of course, … they are known.”
Known … that is, by way of similarly “corrected” history. Finally. Known, that is finally, that it ain’t at all about race!
Pulpits and podia and benches have long never been the realms of Not Males; our stripe and color matters in this Truth not at all. The visitation of Male hypocrisy down upon us, the DEhumans, from such structures, however, most certainly has been. These men’s acts, when None With Voices of all races are watching, are done for and to me. And are done for ill for and to me. These men’s’ acts bring not one of us freedom, no peace and no honor—if these same acts done in blatancy, or done in secrecy, do not bring to all of us Females … humanization.
“Abigail Adams to her husband John: ‘I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors … Put not such power in the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.’ They could, and they did. The machine of the patriarchs ground on, crushing women, children and native races as it went, consigning the flower of its youth to dusty death miles from home, making those same women, children, youths and natives the excuse for all its own self‑serving, self‑deluding obsessions,” writes the verse of Prophetess Rosalind on p. 215 in Chapter Nine, “Dominion and Domination: The Rod of Empire,” of her Holy Scripture, The Women’s History of the World.
Furthermore, the Righteous Prophetess rightly declares early, early on––already on page 3 of her Scriptures’ Introduction––in fact, “… why women’s history at all? Surely men and women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights and wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed, always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances.” And just why is the Prophetess correct about this in history, do you suppose? No, certain white women didn’t have to service any black man at night as well; but at times, certain others did have to and then, at other times, all colors of women had to—had to—fuck all colors of other men.
Or? Or otherwise endure the messes, the wakes of these men’s wills—more than we, “only” physically fucked so far, already had been enduring. We Not Males, We The Other, We The Less Than, We The Not The Standard Measure of All Things Human, We The Females … We have had to permit and to prevail through all of this—no matter the pulpit and podium preachings, no matter the bone‑crushing, mother‑fucking rulings from the judicial benches on high, no matter his pillared or picayune comings and goings and thinkings and doings, no matter the colors of the Males’ canons and marriage contract avowals, sacred or secular.
* * * *
Three months later, in the heart of springtime, AmTaham sat at my cleared, brown table facing east, there for his field of vision a kitchen wall of nondescript—and me. His tender hands squeezed the two of mine across from him. I hurt, and he knew it, and it was only 10 o’clock in the course of that particular morning so far.
Trial was upon us in a couple of weeks’ time hence, and I was not yet released. That is, I am thinking that AmTaham and Mehitable and all of my other blood, too, are these nice, churchly folk who are going to be so disappointed in me when I fail at this vow I had promised to keep for all of my so ungodly life. For a second time! A second failed, males’‑made mawwiage this one is going to be, you see.
After all, it was the Truemaier Boys’ Gran Dame of a grandparent, Mehitable herself, who had screamed at me and within easy earshot of not only AmTaham but also of all three of my sons when we’d returned from that friggin’ wonderment of Wisconsin known as the House on the Rock, “You what?! You did what?! Herry’s moved out?! Om’god, Legion. You went and did it! You did! You really went and did it now, Legion. YOU LOST A MARRIAGE TO A DOCTOR?! HOW COULD YOU LOSE A MARRIAGE TO A DOCTOR, YOU … YOU … YOU IDIOT?!” JYeah. Yup, those’re pretty much exactly the words she shrieked out—when, earlier, I had wanted to scream out at the glossy glassy opulence of that fucking colossal dwelling dangling off a precipice within the Dairy State which she had forced me to pay way over ten cents and ten minutes’ time to tour.
Second time around all right, and Mr. Jazzy Jinx’s lawyering bills: O! were they ever piling up! No, not wedding presents piling up such as “second time around” could suggest, nor even wedding bills piling up. Not with Legion True did it—that phrase—mean either of those! Was it because I’d never worn white that I so flunked out? JYeah, it was surely as simple a fact as the nonvirginal silky sky blue and silver satin on go‑round #1 with John and as, of course, the so, so same nonvirginal kiwi and lime green linen shirtwaist when wed to Mehitable’s idyllic Good and Wonderful … Doctor … Herod Edinsmaier, wasn’t it? Both of which liveries I had initially purchased—for other purposes! That, indeed, must’ve been why: those frocks and their colors were cursed. Or, was it the cloaked thing in the room that was me—the witch … which was cursed?
I wasn’t crying which is unusual; when pissed I usually do sob what Oprah calls “the ugly wail.” Loud and proud? Noooo, I loathe the way I look when I weep. And this morning I was really angry, not just sad, so that I could have been really, really, well, very … uuuunbeautiful! AmTaham had just confirmed again to me what we both already knew, “Herry is pond scum.” Firm realization that the divorce was imminent started when I, always a scientific researcher seeking hard statistical data and, finally too, at 40 years of age, got up the bloody damned nerve to ask my father something I had wanted to––since Herry’s arm ballottement of me a quarter year earlier. “Daddy, out of 100 American males, how many would you say lust after other women every single day of their lives?”
“What?”
“Ah, ah, Um.”
“What did you ask me just now?” It was his deep deafness and my hesitancy on how to phrase the hypothesis in my head into a query instead for Daddy. To him the question wasn’t at all offputting; he just hadn’t heard it.
And AmTaham is my father, “I can ask him anything, can’t I? That is surely what all the parenting books declare. Hell, I’m 40! Of course, I can. And I want to know. Who better for a kiddo to know from than from her own pa?! Than for her father to construe for her the hearts and minds of men.” Especially those specific slices of anatomy on men of conscience! I had a theory, a not too terribly scientifically formed one but a conjecture, nonetheless, that said that Herry was wrong. That men, and of course married ones, did not, not every one of them, “lust after other women every single day” of their lives. They did not, I am thinking. And sort of presuming so all of these weeks since Herry’s swine spew had, once more, slopped onto my eardrums—and onto my spirit behind them—back around that Ides of January.
“Um, out of 100 American men, Daddy, and including the married ones, not just the single ones, how many of that 100, would you say lust after other women every day? Ya’ know, every single day of their lives? Now I know you’ve been all over the world, but I’m not asking about them, just about the ones raised up in America. Ya’ know, in the western world. And they’re adults. They’re not in the teens anymore, Daddy; they’re, they’re over 20 or 21 at least.”
Without a flicker of indecisiveness, without withdrawing his massive and so strong hands from mine, without even so much as a tiny twitch from that eye tic thing of his going on, a painful neuropathy in the right periorbit, cheek and temple with which affliction the poor, poor man had been plagued for at least the last three decades of his own life, he point‑blank into my eyes answered, “Four.”
“Whoa. Four?!?” Confirmed, this number did, most certainly right off that Herry was, indeed, pond shit for sure, I am thinking.
“Yeaaaah. Four.”
“But that can’t be, Daddy. It’s way, uh, uh, it’s way more than that, isn’t it?” another furled brow and, at 40, as nearly all daughters I know believe, still utterly and unconditionally thinking that my father is infallible. Sitting here on Othello Drive in Herry’s kitchen at Herry’s table, it is that certain I’m–the–center–of–Daddy’s–universe je ne sais quoi from when I was, alone with just him in that cold, cold country kitchen, that three‑year‑old sipping really hot mocha lattes made with our real cow’s real cream at 5 in the 1951 morning—that he is my father which, therefore, makes him … perfect.
I walk a lot now and, while doing so, purposefully never use any noise‑blaring electrical device on my hearing ear as I go; where I mostly stroll in Iowa it is silent save for the sounds of Nature. On these twice‑daily forays I have sometimes imagined this man 95 and me 67 … still engaged in such conversations. I have never had such treading notions where the nonagenarian in my brain’s ear is Mehitable. “But Daddy,” I at 67, “you aren’t truly, truly protecting me if you’re still trying to shield me from reality, especially from real men, Daddy! Please, the Truth here on this one, on this statistic. Please.” AmTaham True, an economist by conviction as well as by formal higher education, singularly knew—and enjoyed knowing—the numbers behind the why of something. Give him the data there. “Just the stats, Ma’am.”
Returning to my fourth decade and the statistic on the percentage of American adult males who, every day, lusted, he elaborated, “It may be. It may be way more than that; I don’t really know of course, but I truly do doubt it. I doubt that it is very much more than four.” This sounded to me, um, … better, at least better, a truer answer, even if with no mammoth figure in it than just the number four. “I do know one thing for certain though, Kitty.”
“Yeah? What is that?”
“The vast majority of men do not possess carnal greed, let alone the time necessary for it. We just aren’t made up like that.”
“No?! Yeah well, I get the time thing, Daddy, but not the prurient part?” I had learned that word from AmTaham. What I’d really learned from him about ‘prurient’ is how to correctly pronounce it which, to this day, I hear folks, even ones knowledgeable, ones who should know Noah like Daddy knew Webster’s but apparently do not, slaughter it.
“No, we aren’t. We are not. Not truly accountable men. We are not. And if you walk even just over this country alone, let alone over the World, there is so much to just staying alive that consumes a man’s will and his energies that, well, that is where his desires are placed. If he is responsible. You know, accountable. That is what polishes off a man’s innards.”
What I hadn’t yet defined for myself, let alone learned deep in the pit of me, Daddy was so trying to teach me. When a man’s thoughts interfere with life’s responsibilities, whether to the self or to the self who has chosen to closely put others into his life, then that is … unaccountability. The effort and time expended in thinking, an action in itself—and so, so often consuming inordinate amounts of time—results in outward endeavors and labors that either are the taking care to keep one’s self and his family alive, safe, well and happy or it results in the squandering, slacking, defrauding, cheating, deceiving, threatening, dehumanization and destruction of those same people and of all that is worthy to them.
AmTaham finished, “Nothing, absolutely not one thing, is done, no act happens from out the hands and mouth and feet nor out from any other anatomy either, unless it is … first … thought up. Not by any human being, male or female, Kitty. Molecules of sex hormone chemicals cause a man to look after the well‑being of himself and his loved ones? Uh–uh. You will never convince me of that, that sexual desire and lustful thinking over and over and on and on every single day, result in the actions that keep a nation’s people healthy, safe and happy. Never. Sure, lusting occurs. And sometimes more than at other times, but thinking is not only an act but an act of … discipline. One truly accountable disciplines himself before choosing, before choice‑making. Will is what I’m talking about. One’s will is honed; it is disciplined. And this is begun as a little, little kid, Kiddo. Honing one’s will is. Into making the choices about then going ahead and doing The Right Thing. Both then as small, small children and right now, too. No, accountable men do not lust after anything—power, material wealth or women—every day. And, Kitty, neither do accountable women! I’m not saying that women aren’t seductresses and temptresses or just looking for fun? Sure, that they can be. But not every single damn day. Fudge, no. Anyhow, how absolutely exhausting would that be, don’t you suppose? Well, think about it, wouldn’t it be? Yes, so the same is true, not on all matters I know, but on this one? I am convinced on this one. About this—your stat question, Legion—I am correct. Four.”
“Wow! Now that’s protection, Daddy!” I didn’t tell him this though because to say so now, “Thanks, Thanks a heap!” Thanks now for my finally receiving his learned refuge and protective pedagogy now—that is, now two failed marriages later and at least four, those four of his statistic, bad boys before and in between—well, … it would only’ve served to hurt him.
* * * *
Aprovechar is a verb—and a concept—expressed in the Spanish language which when defined in regard to someone’s acts means “to take the greatest advantage of,” “to get out of something for yourself its fullest benefits.” The 40‑something noncustodial mother and middle school teacher who tutored me about it, a wanderer of European Caucasian descent who had walked around Mexico and Central America and had herself there been schooled regarding it, stated that what its understanding is to us in English lingo is “to swindle,” “to screw the hell out of.”
The crux of this corruption—the lethal whammy of this particular verb, however—is that its correct usage pertains to swindling and to screwing loved ones as well as to that corruption perpetrated and visited upon just anyone and everyone else. Upon supposed loved ones and folks known and close to us, that is. Upon people we are alleged … to love. In other words, the mama and middle school teacher stated to me, it is a most acceptable, understood—and even expected—practice to perform acts of aprovechar in order to acquire for yourself its noun, aprovecharse which means “profit,” even though these actions can be the swindling and the screwing of one’s very own mother or daughter or son or mother‑in‑law or girlfriend or colleague or teacher or priest or neighborhood cop or … district civil court judge … and vice versa.
“Now just how does this get to be acceptable, understood, even expected?” I am left thinking.
“Well, it’s just their culture. Ya’ gotta unnerstan’, it’s just how things are done there,” is the usual, flippancy that I receive back in reply, back to me from several, unrelated sources, ones who, I suspect, are not truly thinking that answer through with care before hissing and spitting it back at me.
“Uh–uh.” I counter. First off, that’s no explanation. That’s an excuse—just an excuse of the Prophetess’s type about which she writes in her Scripture. Saying that it is ‘culture’, that it is ‘cultural’, that it is a ‘custom’ of some other folks’ ‘diversity’ and ‘tradition’ and ‘ethnicity’ and that that is ‘just the way it is’, why, that is an excuse of “the rod of empire” and “the crushing dominion over” type of excuse for why things are. For why things such as corruption, abuse and violence happen in certain areas or even with different peoples in certain parts of the world. Chapter 9, verse, … well, page 215, of Prophetess’s The Women’s History of the World, I am thinking. An excuse to, indeed, get something for yourself or get done an outcome that you want to have happen. A selfish, self‑serving, oftentimes self‑aggrandizing and, most probably, a vengeance‑exacting excuse. Simple, a simple trick. Actually the perpetrators of all war and all of its participants, of its warriors … use precisely this excusing, this tricking. This corruption, abuse and violence.
Secondly, if one screws, swindles, gropes the greatest advantage and takes out of a circumstance its fullest benefits by becoming, that is, by morphing into someone who deceives, defrauds, slacks off at, squanders, threatens, dehumanizes and destroys her or his good name and those of others, well, fuck! That isn’t cultural or traditional or customizing or ethnic. That doesn’t just happen in certain areas and by the doings of certain peoples of the most southerly portion of North America. That happens … everywhere and is done, at some time or another, ashamedly to be sure, by, well, … by everybody! But it is not accepted, it is not to be understood and it is, in no fucking way, expected. Because in all those places everywhere else? There, too, in all those places, it also has a name, a meaning, the same meaning. And that collective and aggregate naming of it is … that aprovechar is a friggin’ WRONG!
A wrong as big as in, “He done her wrong!” Or, “She done him wrong!” She or he is a father—, er, ah, I mean, a mother‑fucking taker. And that, to become a taker, … that is a wrong.
You can have your every‑waking‑moment lustful and surround‑sound pornographic thoughts. You can have your flings after such thoughts, junior ml king. You, Herod Edinsmaier, you can have, in addition, your incessant procrastination, your insatiable insecurities, your passive aggressive fits, your narcissistic ones and even some fun at those romps, the ones either in your head or gropingly and voyeuristically acting them out inside your goddamn exhibitionistic bed. But what you cannot do, Mr. Aprovechar (instead of Mister Doctor Wonderful or hardly Reverend Doctor Wonderful) is … insult me.
You cannot expect me to understand nor can you expect me to find any of it … acceptable. Nor will you, in any fucking way, find me agreeable to promoting and to enabling you in your quite literal mother‑fucking pursuit of any of it. You can have it all but utterly none of it, as a matter of fact, can you have … on my time or on my dime. Or with, ever at all—in any mother‑fucking format—my Truemaier Boys.
You just can’t have any of it and, at the same time, have also … avowals, accountability and prominence or dare to preach to or judge out of chancel pulpits or from behind solid oak podia and leather hide‑trimmed, judicial benches … me!
And the absolute last mother‑fucking thing I will ever let you, Edinsmaier, do is make me … “go under.”
As in … make me “undergo” a Strindberg‑style program, er, … pogrom … of mental therapy that you, Dr. Aprovechar, have “designed” in order to change, in any frickin’ way, me! Least of all will I succumb to your plan of conniving fuckwash to change me over to … your way of being! I shall not be tattered with your chatter and your prattle of how it is I don’t understand you or how I don’t understand your people or how it is I am not tolerant or that I am discriminatory or that I should be (even more fucking) generous to you and not (what you call) prudish, straight‑laced, that I need to just get over, that I need to just quit with my disgust and loathing of your obsessions with yourself and your accoutrements—be they in your hands or in your pants.
I shall not … become, Mister Corrupt Doctor. I shall not become, with your tyranny and your torture of me … you. And you will never, never, never “sign off” on me. Uh–uh. Uuuuh–uh. I shall not become you.
Except hardened. In my way and not yours. I shall become hardened, steeled. A ring of steel around my finger, no longer a gold ring, a ring of steel around all of myself. Tougher and stronger than I had ever previously thought myself capable of … becoming!
There’s an order to having your disorder of aprovechar addiction, too, Dr. Edinsmaier. That’s dis–order: jya’ know, as in dis–ease, malady, sickness, illness. You can have all of your sickness, your illness, all of what you want, even when it is getting your pros and yourself some strange, having your porno pix and “poetry” and your slimy jokes’ prose, even frotteurizing her when she isn’t looking and not able then to positively identify your hands and your crotch. Or, your face. You can. Just not exactly when it enters your head to have it, however.
You want a couple of prostitutes? Fine. You want to engage in all manner of these sexual addiction behaviors of yours—from voyeurism to exhibitionism to the indecent liberties’ groping in the press of a crowded elevator or the clamor of a St. Cecil’s youth basketball game, Herry? How it was you did grope Grace?! Fine! Just not when you are … in my life. So, jya’ know, that will mean not with Grace! Since she’s my very best friend, jya’ know, Grace is in my life! So … not with Grace!
You can take it all, Corrupt Doctor Daddee. But you cannot take it – and have me and my Boys, too. That is the aprovechar insult to us four which AmTaham is helping me to stop you from taking from us. You cannot be around me and around my children and keep on taking from us our dignity and our integrity like that. So in the order of things that, … that … is why you are gone, Pillar of the Community Doctor Edinsmaier! You can have it all, the dissing, the disrespect and the disloyalty and the distrust and the disconnect—your unaccountability, Herry—but now? Now … you order it up from others. Not from us four. Not anymore.
Given enough rope—about such men as you, Herry, one of John Stoltenberg’s and AmTaham’s 4 percent at least, comes a prediction! From another of Stoltenberg’s so‑apt descriptions of you, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, you Pillared Man of Medicine in the Community, from his 1989 Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, p. 183.
“PREDICTION: Many men of conscience, when their wife says goodbye, when their live‑in maid says clean your own piss around the toilet, when their politically astute feminist comrade‑in‑arms says “I no longer trust you” and stops wanting to hang out together—when their personal conduit to feminist consciousness leaves them—many men of conscience will become less and less like men of conscience and more and more like ordinary men. They will turn their attention to political issues that don’t blatantly remind them of the fact that men like themselves oppress women like her. Nuclear energy. Wars in foreign lands. Food co‑ops. Rent strikes. Important issues, not unimportant issues. It’s just that they’re better than alcohol or drugs when your heart is broken. AND YOU WANT IT TO HARDEN.”
Or, when she does recover her memory, then what? Then what, when it comes back to her what he’s done to her, what he still does to her, what he takes from her, when she wakes up and grabs back out of that so pissed‑on, draining toilet her dignity and her integrity before he flushes it and her away forever, then what from some of these men of conscience? They will turn their attention to a few blatant issues that not only remind them of their oppressing, but they will go there willfully—with that exact purpose of will. And, for him, the ultimate epitome of aprovechar in every single sense of its meanings everywhere will be to take away, to wrench away from her, that fucking waked‑up wench, her children. Her children. Her, not his—never his—never, never, never his Truemaier Boys.
* * * *
Mirzah Truemaier, who is, I so desire, one of those true and pure men of conscience, at least in the making, needs to remember who Herod Edinsmaier, his most immediate male Ancestor in The Making, and then too, who his Righteous Ancestor AmTaham True both are. Grace says it isn’t so, that Mirzah is already lost. That he is just another Herry. Herry, the amoral atheist. Grace, who has been with me—right along beside me—throughout this entire decade and a half. That is what she thinks and she tells me so, too.
Because, Grace says, Mirzah was with me, his mama, the least amount of time of all of my children and that what time there was with me as his primary caretaker and, therefore, as his primary influencer in his littlest years, well, she says it just wasn’t enough. Not enough time. Thieves, a primary one and quite a few others, took … stole that time from us. Grace is Grace Portia of the Listening College. She is my truest, my best friend; and when she does finally speak, she is sober, she is deliberate and she is measured. She does not speak with a tiny voice. I do well to listen to her, and that is what she says.
Lionel Portia has, about Mirzah, the same thing to say and for the same tortuous time constraint reason––but also for another. Lionel repeatedly tells both Grace and me, “The best thing a father can do for his children is to stay well‑married to the kiddos’ mother. The best thing a father can do for his kids is to love their mama.” Lionel is just like Grace, his spouse, as far as soberspeak. He does not talk much and never animates. Never. One tends to listen to Lionel without hesitation; because of his utterly flat affect, you’re just sort of drawn to hearing what it is he has to tell you. It’s about … accountability, it is. From a true man of conscience, it’s about accountability.
Lionel’s hands clasped Grace’s shoulders outside a Second Judicial District courtroom one October day when he finally spoke about Mirzah, about Jesse, about Zane and, to Grace, most especially about—Herry. About Herod Edinsmaier. His jaw nearly immobile when he spoke, Lionel deadpanned right into her lovely brown eyes as he tenderly yet ever so imperceptibly squeezed both of her upper arm deltoids. “You just remember, you remember, Grace, what that man took from all of us. Can you do that? For yourself, for Legion of course, and for me too, Grace? Can you remember, Darling?” Grace, unlike Mirzah and unlike me and unlike so, so many women, Grace had, well, Grace had never mother‑fuckingly forgotten.
I so yearn to know that Grace is, on this one––on Mirzah, wrong. But, I fear, I do not know. I don’t know about Mirzah. I do know, though, that it is not about the male’s humiliation, his embarrassment, his shame, his avoiding the Truth and protecting and hiding his image. It’s not about him.
It is about accountability and what AmTaham calls “so much to just staying alive” that we should learn and remember from our ancestors. On becoming accountable, on that, Mirzah. Accountable Ancestors‑in‑Training and, then too, what eventually always, always will follow: Accountable Ancestoring.
It is about remembering history, our history—and what happens when we do not.
To that end then, Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, iiiit’s … Show Time!
* * * *
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: Legion’s husband/Sperm Source [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [her mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Mi Sprision O'Revinnoco: Herry’s sister [misprision: concealing knowledge of treason/O'Revinnoco = O'Connivero backwards]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Ava Saffron True and Zebulon True: respectively, Legion's paternal grandmother and her husband, Legion's paternal grandfather
Rowland and Wyman Natures: respectively, Legion's most favored uncle and most favored male first cousin
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissi(st) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Legion’s Friends: Margaret, Mona, Yanira, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl
Legion’s Best Friends: Ms Grace and Dr Lionel Portia
Wende: = Legion's friend after divorce [committed suicide due to Custody Crisis]
Jim Cornball: Herry’s acquaintance from AA and realtor
Loser Lorn: Insurance agent referred by Cornball
Judge Harley Butcher: Family Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Jazzy Jinx: Legion’s Family Court lawyer who sold her out
Shindy Scheisser: Herry’s lawyer [shindy = noisy; scheisser = German for shithead]
Li Zhang: Herry’s Aussie affair
Dr Freddie Goldstein & Ella: Herry’s colleague and wife
Mick: = Herry's acquaintance from high school; best man [not in Herry’s life after that as he had no true friends]
Varry Wussamai: Herry's AA sponsor (not a real friend) [I am a wuss backwards]
David Humes: nursing student; classmate of Legion's, y1968 - y1971, New York City
Edmund Silver: Legion's boyfriend pre-Herry
Braemore St: where Legion and her family lived, y1983 - y1986
Havencourt condominium: Legion's Ames apartment; after separation
Zephyr: tabby cat of Zane's, Mirzah's, Jesse's [pronounced “Zay – fear”]
Madonna: realtor
Larry Brouhaha: court-mandated marriage counselor
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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