CHAPTER 27: The Opera: Act II; Part 3 [cont.]
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother"
In this section of Chapter 27, Part 3, Herry works on destroying Legion’s job and career prospects with the assistance of his new wife, who’s taken on the family role of “Sheriff of Nottingham”—his “implementer and enforcer”. Financial devastation of Legion is a main vengeful goal of theirs, since that can be used against her in Family Court, as well as damage her life greatly.
The other central objective is to keep Legion from seeing her boys ever, at all. One way is to notify their schools that she is not allowed to see them and say they must keep her away. When the principal at Zane’s high school meets with Legion, he tells her, point blank, to “not ever” come back. Legion is crushed and continues rocking in her cushioned rocker attempting to soothe her increasing pain from the loss of her boys.
Meanwhile, Legion is led to believe that her attorney is busy working hard on her appeal to the district appellate court to overturn the trial court ruling that granted Herry sole custody and her zilch.
In the last section, Legion refuses to submit to “therapy” overseen by Herry and that is used to deny any visits with her boys, but she sneaks and spends time with them after school. However, she must spend another entire holiday season alone, rocking and rocking to cope with the loss of her precious boys. Part 3 begins with Legion having decided to appeal the fraudulent and unjust verdict of sole custody for Herry and zero visitation for her. But her attorney requires a small fortune up front and she’s already been drained of everything from litigating the two lower court trials. She desperately looks for someone who can loan her money so she can do the appeal
CHAPTER 27 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother begins with Act I of “The Opera”—from Book 3, the last part of the book. “The Opera” has three Acts with five Parts—one for each of the three Family Court and two Appellate Court trials. Chapter 27 covers Acts I and II: the first two Family Court trials and the first Appellate Court trial. [This is a long chapter and will be published in newsletter-sized bites.]
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
“If the Ex‑Cunt can’t work in her specialized fields, why then she is, for certain, fucked over as a custodial mother when it comes to her inside a court of family law thinkin’ that she’ll ever again be able to come after me and prevail! Ha! Fuck her!”
Principal Druid, taller than I by about six or seven inches, this time engaged squarely down into my azure eyes; and there may have been, just maybe there was, a slight, ever so slight tinge of “Shit, I’m so sorry for you, Ma’am” in those brown ones of his … “I, ah, I’m, um, I’m gonna hafta ask you to leave now and not come back. I trust you won’t be back, right? I mean … not ever.”
…I wasn’t. I never saw Principal Druid nor the people of the Urbandale High School nor my Zane there. Ever. More salt poured onto a wound so deep it would never, never heal.
Dr. True's Opera in Three Acts—with Five Parts
CHAPTER 27: Act II; Part 3
Apparently the temporary pathology positions within the largest of Iowa’s cities were about as plentiful and capable of sustaining and uplifting a household of four pre‑teens and teenagers plus the Next Cunt in Daddee’s Stash as the temporary veterinary microbiology ones were in Ames! But I had to carefully and continuously surveil the streets around the schools because Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive in her folie à deux‑posturing as the Sheriff of His Majesty’s Nottingham patrolled them either in the red Baretta which Ms. McLive had brought to the wedded union or with Mary Jane riding along with … mother and adopted daughter side‑by‑side as yet another folie à deux‑posturing inside the newest vehicle, their Chevy #2, which Ms. McLive and the Kingdom’s highest monarch, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, had subsequently then purchased together. The AM General Corporation’s equivalent of a family Humvee, a faux woody, white paddy wagon of vintage remoteness, the thingy had eight or ten or a hundred cylinders and about 15 seats or something. An armored tank from which––for sure––to fight off attacks from … The Mother Legion!
Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive held for me only one mystery. Otherwise her and Ms. Canard’s male‑identified persona of female read, for me, like an open book––which it probably was: that is, that of Mehitable’s text for such women—full‑up of those deferent, soft and servile directives of my mother’s. I wondered how it was that Ms. McLive appeared to be getting away with it: with smoking cigarettes.
Herry as Herry had drunk, all right, barrel loads of brew to be sure and even drove drunk innumerable times, those times all crimes, of course; but Herry as Dr. Edinsmaier loathed tobacco. And I mean: looooathed it. All cigarette, cigar and chewing forms of it.
I should know. I was a “recovered smoker,” an ex‑smoker of both cigarettes and cigars, those little cigarillo kind, Swisher Sweets without the filter––which I inhaled and … adored. Devin, of Edinsmaier’s and my mutual friends Abby and Devin, had quit with his tobacco addiction altogether by first switching from cigarettes to those wee cigarillo Sweets and had in just two months’ time completely weaned himself totally off nicotine. I was so impressed that he, an ex‑Viet Nam War marine who drank the quantities that Herry consumed could accomplish this, quit the beer and lose 20 pounds all in less than six months’ time that I was sure Devin’s plan would work, the no‑nicotine part of it at least, for me, too. I threw away the last Pall Mall non‑filters’ cellophane, empty of course, and purchased my first five‑pack of the Sweets and, well, … five years later! voila! on Wednesday, the 10th day of August 1983, I smoked up and inhaled in … my very last one of those, too. Finally.
That Thursday I quit cold turkey and, at the time, this––smoking cessation––this was the hardest thing that I had ever done. I had done it most unwillingly as well––to which almost all nicotine‑addicted people can attest. I loved smoking. Every damned thing about it I loved; and I don’t need to name all of those things because every smoker, and every single ex‑smoker especially, knows already what these are.
When I first met Herry, though, what I loved most about my smoking was knowing that, with him as my boyfriend, I wouldn’t ever have to fucking quit! Why? Because we had our own folie à deux thingy going on: Herod Edinsmaier drank and Legion True smoked. I didn’t drink but maybe one glass of Chablis every month or two if out to dinner, and Herry never smoked a Sweet, not even now and then. A meerschaum pipe––yes––but Pathologist Edinsmaier slickly and easily and quite out loud rationalized and justified, let alone, in his own thinking construed this specific aristocratic posturing … as, for him anyhow, a healthful activity!
If Dr. Herod Edinsmaier drank the way that he did, to distraction, why then I quietly understood that I could unyieldingly albeit inexpressibly enjoy my own fucking addiction. It was when Herry quit the actual beer intake that I, for five further years, had grown truly uneasy about my continuing to light up anything. I no longer had my cohort in external chemical substances’ addictions, let alone, the tacit awareness that neither one of us would come down on the other for it. I continued to smoke up until there exploded a straw in August 1983, the brokeback kind, the type that breaks camels’ humpbacks, that genre of jolting straw.
At the age of 35, 17 years out from the first Kool which I had inhaled as an 18‑year‑old truckstop waitress at the Landmark Restaurant just off Interstate 80 at the Williamsburg exit––and a damned good one there, too, which I totally loved doing, I might add––kind of a Diner‑Diva Louise Sawyer type I was, only younger––of Thelma and Louise––and besides all of the obvious reasons to quit, the pulmonary, circulatory and cardiac assaults, why had I? Why had I actually ceased using all forms of tobacco? Because Herry had threatened to leave me––and to take all of the Truemaier Boys with him back then already––if I didn’t. If I did not quit smoking!
I have to spit now at remembering Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s shaming and browbeating. The pathological scene so typifies Herry: Mirzah, Jesse and Zane sound asleep, we are in bed ourselves, Husband Herry’s just made the utterly respectful, honoring, loving, tender and amorous advance of stating straight up to the blackened ceiling of the Manhattan, Kansas bedroom that he’s thinking it’d be a good thing for the two of us “to screw” as in, to the mother of these three Sons, “Ya’ wanna screw?”––then immediately and blasély augmenting that one with this next romantic overture, “O, by the way, you have to quit smoking or I’m leaving you and taking the Boys. I won’t be saddled with a respiratory cripple, and I can already tell jus’ from listening to ya’, Twat, that you’re headed for emphysema. I don’t give a shit if you get lung cancer, Cunt; that fuck’ll kill ya’ outright. But if you develop emphysema, you might hang on for 10 years or more, and I’m not gonna do that. So. Lemme fuck that pussy. O wait a minute, where’s the mirror? I wanna flash that penlight up it and get me some strange.”
So. How Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive had managed her “pre”‑emphysemic ruse and seemed to actually be pulling this gimmickry of hers over on Herry was indeed puzzling to me. From Mr. Shindy Scheisser at Act Two Part Two there’d been accusation after accusation flung at me on cross‑examination about how I had damaged my three, “count ‘em … three” fetuses!––as indeed I had done. And as to how even more evil a mother I had been for continuing to model that dragging and puffing behavior around my sons!––as indeed I had done. So my thinking now went something like, “How is Herry Edinsmaier’s Next Cunt apparently ‘getting away’ with this?!”
From afar I had seen his Next Cunt for myself––out leaning and inhaling away on the residence’s front stoop, a scant three steps with one black railing going down to the bungalow property’s front sidewalk. Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive hadn’t even bothered to try to hide it from the neighbors by, say, exhaling only out in the tiny backyard amongst the garbage cans or herself all encased inside its detached but camouflaging garage. As a matter of fact, though, she did not seem totally relaxed about it because I don’t recall seeing her ever sitting and reposing on the steps of that stoop, only upside the railing, dragging and dragging and then back inside––with ashes, butts and all other telltale evidences gone missing from the front of the house, I would imagine. The neighbors? Well, if one herself isn’t at all neighborly, then there’d be no concern on that account either. Still, the teeth and the fingertips and the smell: how did she denature, dilute out and neutralize those? Even if Dr. Edinsmaier wasn’t at home or even for days and days and days in Urbandale, then how did she disguise all of this odor and onerousness when actually having to put herself around my Truemaier Boys?!
Local job scarcity gave the Good and Wonderful Dr. Herod Edinsmaier another route of accountability escapement. I guess, like the Elton John lyric in The Opera in a classic tenor solo of arrested development in a 40‑something manipulator, Herry was just “gone up around the bend”––bent upon fleeing from the five others to whom he had only just fastened himself less than a full half year earlier. Weekends King Herod was home, and I was not in Urbandale because of it. I had me some serious rocking to do to make it through the cold of those Saturdays and Sundays.
On the late Friday morning of 08 February 1991, I placed another telephone call; but this one was a local, no‑fee one and finally not a toll call to Ms. Carlotta Klutz at all. Ms. Klutz––on Wyman’s and three other Natures’ precious dimes, er, tens of thousands of dollars actually––was allegedly hard at work, at least at ‘work’ on her acting role in The Opera at any rate, on ‘my appeal’: Part Three. I am of the official opinion, now, that that consisted primarily of Klutz––sitting and waiting––after about 20 or 30 words to that effect on my behalf, initially set down most probably by her able assistant Dee Dee! had been file‑stamped somewhere inside the state’s Capitol Building.
The veterinary researcher on the other end of the wire answered my call transferred in to him by the federal agency’s all‑round receptionist, “No, the NADC will not be needing you to report Monday.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No, you have no job here, Dr. True.”
“Whaa–aat?”
“I’m certain you heard me and understood, did you not? You will not be coming onto the premises next Monday morning nor at any other future time.”
I hadn’t signed anything––true that was––but the purpose of my call, the reason that I had telephoned in was to confirm that the date of the 11th was not for the NADC, indeed, a federal President’s Day holiday, its being freethinking, atheist Abraham’s real birthday then … Tuesday, 12 February, the very next day. That I would, wouldn’t I, find open and operational my office and my desk and my laboratory‑to‑be? “But, Dr. Jones?!”
“The point is moot. I am hanging up.” Click.
From out of where had that stun gun just fired its slug bolt between my ears?! I went down. Right down. Knees buckled. And I crashed to the floor, the result, too, of the crushing reality of Rachel’s backlash.
As The Opera was playing itself out, the Biologics Unit, bequeathing me with their mask of feigned solace the hour before, had responded to my very same phone inquiry into its building with their “fact” that funding sponsorship wasn’t “at all” what the men had expected for “the project” soooo …, consequently, there was no bovine bacterin development post available now … after all, and all of the guys there, of course, well, they were in no position, “probable upcoming hiring freezes and all like that there,” to even know if or when that “situation” could change.
I couldn’t go to Urbandale that afternoon. I couldn’t do anything that afternoon. I was hemorrhaging. Fully bleeding out so it seemed.
The last thing in the room that my Truemaier Boys needed to see lifeless … was me.
Accompanied by the buoyancy and spongy porosity of my blankets and comforter I floated from the deep end of the ocean that was my king mattress on the upper level down to the cushioned rocker in the condo’s front room before my raggedy heart attempted the arresting sidestroke of the roundtrip lap back up again and into the bed. While not medically thriving under the absence of blood glucose, a DEhuman’s brain is fortuitously her last organ to shut down. Must be because of our near immediate metabolic and physiologic switchover instead to usable ketones by way of oxidation of adipose, our fat deposited during babies’ growths in and of us. The glorious and glorifying and life‑forming and life‑giving fat. That fat. Even within the midst of the angst of a soooo unplanned … bleed‑out.
Linda Kincaid, as I have said, worked at the agency; she served there as secretary for several federal researchers among whom included Dr. Jones. Past tense, that is worked, was key here; within moments, well, within a few February days and nights of my rocking really and of her hearing of the ramifications to me of a certain piece of paper, my new true friend confirmed for me what was developing inside that drained brain of mine. By the end of the next week it was clear that again––actually that TWICE AGAIN––the 25 September 1990 Ames Tribune article, cut out and complete with my headlining picture and both the front page and the rest of it on page two, had … “somehow” … “anonymously” … surfaced at both the National Animal Disease Laboratory and at the National Veterinary Biologics Laboratory: All of that hard‑copy mother‑fuck had personally crossed the desks of not only Dr. Jones but also that of the Biologics chieftain. As she did with all of his daily mail and stamping it with the date received, of course, Linda had been the employee to actually open up the manila envelope addressed most directly to Dr. Jones himself. Enclosed within that envelope and accompanying the documents meant for Dr. Jones existed several more copies of the Tribune’s woman‑loathing slam as well––apparently those extra copies of it … intended for whomever besides himself Dr. Jones deemed in need of another one.
A second phone call to the Biologics man with whom I’d initially mostly dealt corroborated there what must have been nearly the same scenario over across town at the NADC with Dr. Jones––but with an added androcentric and angering yet soooo, so typical twist. It seemed that the Biologics chieftain, as a matter of fact, remembered that a woman in their front office received a telephone call––previous to mine––coming in on the morning of the 11th. The man on the line stated that he was calling long‑distance from Des Moines and asked the woman if she would please send to him at his law firm written verification or documenting proof of the specific starting date and accepted annual salary plus benefits for one Dr. Legion True who was involved in a lawsuit in which he was “a representing attorney.” Her expediency in this matter, the Des Moines lawyer had explained, would save them all the trouble of his first obtaining a subpoena and her agency then being served with it. The woman, Biologics man confirmed to me, had straightaway faxed over to the telephoning counselor’s firm––right off … all of that requested ‘human resources’ information upon Dr. True. The worker begged off her culpable stupidity by moaning that she never knew that … the male voice had not at all belonged to my attorney of record, that … daMan directing her wasn’t Dr. True’s “representing attorney.” She’d just assumed, of course, that … daMan was!
With a little bit of seniority and a whale of a lot of secrecy, Linda Kincaid put in for and obtained an internal transfer. She was struggling in an appeal for Bazil herself; the last thing she needed was to fight the utter and societally entrenched mother‑you’re‑so‑fucked, boomeranging backlash as well.
I was finished.
And I hadn’t even begun.
It was early 1991. I was a mama. I had not been an academic researcher nor a professor of veterinary microbiology nor a clinical practitioner since before July 1987, now almost four years out. Crashed, crushed and burned, and I hadn’t even been the (multiple!) small planes’ owner‑pilot; Lavish‑Spending Hoo‑Hah Edinsmaier is that person.
In four years’ time the number of newly minted and superbly fresh PhDs cranked out across this country, Eurasia and Australasia is beyond my wanting to count them, and all of the ones with post‑graduate veterinary microbiology fellowship experience on their résumés beat out … me. I had had exactly zero days of post‑dissertational fellowship education or experience back then … or since. With genetic engineering and gene mapping burgeoning and exploding in arenas so massive that even I could not have imagined them all, I had no chance. None. Not now I didn’t.
Well, mission accomplished. King Herod’s tyrannical reigning mission accomplished.
The King with the folie in the form of his sexual addiction masqueraded as alcohol abuse instead, the King with the folie in the form of his shyster and all that that “legal” wrangling meant, the King with the folie in the form of his High Aggrandizier and all of the fucking mother‑loathing power and control that daJudge had soooo UNconstitutionally … had unbelievably … crowned upon Herry, the King with the folie à deux in the form of his dictates’ implementer and enforcer, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive. With all of those follies, er folies, why The Opera, King Herod was confident, was drawing to a vapid closure. And a rapid one: Legion True was lifeless. Stopped.
“Hell, if Legion can’t find work, even as a politico, a mere minion for the county, then she will not be able to support herself! If she can’t work, she sure’s hell can’t provide for any one, two or three of the boys, let alone, hide any of ‘em away somewhere. Even if one, two or all three of them decide to run away back to her––and they are now of the age where this idea has more than probably crossed both Zane’s and Jesse’s minds, if not also materialized inside of Mirzah’s. If the Ex‑Cunt can’t work in her specialized fields, why then she is, for certain, fucked over as a custodial mother when it comes to her inside a court of family law thinkin’ that she’ll ever again be able to come after me and prevail! Ha! Fuck her!” Dr. Edinsmaier to himself dreamt … so … to Employee Scheisser paid him off … to conspiratorially act … at Herry‑Daddee’s beck‑and‑call behest.
I could not return to nursing even. With a bachelor’s degree in it conferred from ivy‑covered Cornell University, I had been quite a nurse anomaly working in the three, small, Midwestern county hospitals. But just as soon as I’d been accepted into veterinary medical college, probably around the very damned and fucked day when Herry and I had first‑ever met at that campustown dance club, I placed myself onto the State of Iowa’s inactive list for its registered nurses. The cost of maintaining and renewing an active state license—what, with continuing education credits and all—I just could not then afford and, as well, pay veterinary school tuition. I didn’t really need it officially operative in order to be working part‑time with animals as a veterinary central sterile supply technician nor even as the anesthesia and surgery nurse for the college’s small animal clinic so I purposefully had let it lapse but not before first securing, I had thought, a safety net by properly requesting to be placed onto that inactive roster.
Someone with a lovely voice––a nurse’s voice for sure I remember thinking upon the return call––from the state’s examining board got back to me nearly right away. There was a shortage then, just as now, so perhaps my initial inquiry would prove fruitful, but rationally I did not hold out much realism. I had not practiced nursing nor even been officially active since the spring of 1974, while earning weekends and some nights to finish the prerequisites of organic chemistry, genetics and physics. To secure top grades in physics in order to get myself accepted into veterinary medical college I paid a tutor. To pay the tutor I, maintaining in my larynx the required nice nurse’s voice, injected many an androcentric buttock with anti‑gonorrheal penicillin on Saturday and Sunday mornings at the University’s health center, those buttocks attached to student athletes––for whose tutors you and I and the rest of the entire State of Iowa paid. These asshole, literally fucking men received their tutors at noooo charge! But throughout all of those weekends’ administering labors of mine when I was soooo not free to enjoy my own earned and fully paid‑for fucks, “Nice voice now! Use your nice voice now, Nurse True!” Talk about the honor and the respect, or more honestly, the utter absence thereof … in and for real and hard work!
The upshot in the spring of 1991, now some 17 years out from active nursing duty, was for me most grim. A shortage there indeed was; that meant not in health care personnel for me and my concerns but just in bucks alone to buy the rent and food, let alone, for gasoline to Urbandale or to pay for both my appellant and my personal attorney’s fees. Seventeen years away, why, reality so kicked in: the examining board truly had for me no safety net news, “Hmmm, that long, huh?” The sweet tone remained resolute, “We’d have no choice then. You’ll have to take two years of refreshers, ya’ know, like at DMACC or … or, ah, Boone’s branch’d be closer to you, right?”
Two years more to reactivate my nursing license?!! Whoa!! That was a no‑brainer. How the hell did she propose I pay, tomorrow, to live while paying them or some close‑by community college to get me “back up and running,” so to speak? Just exactly how was that going to come about? State‑required refresher training to aid in the diminishment of a nursing shortage did not involve any fellowships or grants or scholarships, not to mention, any noncustodial and unemployed mothers’ paid sabbatical leaves––in order for mama to be able, “in just a short two years’ time,” that now very annoying, even disgusting voice blithered at me, to punch a clock hanging outside some emergency room’s service entrance.
“Legion will not have money incoming. That’s for mother‑fucking sure. I have seen to that, and she’ll never be able to touch me. Fuck! She can’t even move away to find work! Where’ll she ever get the money for that besides the start‑up costs like just the beginning utility payments or even an extra month’s rent for the security deposit?!” I reckoned Revenging Herry to himself crooned in a descant’s decrescendo about now.
Anything further that Dr. Edinsmaier sang, through particularly the duets with Lawyer Shindy Scheisser or the aria with Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive, would just be icing on The Mother‑Fucking Opera’s cake. I mean I was already down and dead. How much more insult to injury need Herry muck onto my cadaver after that!?! With May came the promise––and the threat––of classes out soon and the Boys’ first summer with her. And with Herry, but … with Herry as Dr. Herod Edinsmaier so that would actually define as a summertime … with Daddee‑Herry gone … and absent! As one without Herry.
I would no longer have the easy cover of my favored library parking lot nor the Urbandale schools’ soccer bleachers. Maybe I could get inside to the high school’s swimming pool stands but, no, I didn’t have a season family pass to present so that didn’t work. Within hours of my asking about the pool entry, why I couldn’t even seem to get inside the high school where Zane would be starting in the fall, a massive, red brick structure on Aurora Avenue and only a couple of blocks east of the middle school where Jesse would finish and Mirzah was to begin. Its Principal Druid put the office administration on a heightened, all‑out alert. But the workers, fembots all except for himself of course and stationed behind their open countertops within steps of the building’s multiple sets of swinging doors, were only on the lookout for one individual, Fucked Mother Legion True, coming in their front; and, although I never tried, I presumed that security at other entries, was quite tight, too. As it should be—of course: Noooo fucked mamas’ll be allowed to invade their kiddos’ centers of communal learning!
“Well, then. Ah, um, ah, please, … ah, please have Mr. Druid come out here then, if you would?” I had been halted in my tracks by one of the enmeshing consorters who seemed to know who I was. I had no clue who she was and could swear I’d never met her before. Yet she so knew me and had moved with amazing swiftness to come barreling through those front doors to stop me from advancing one mucky step closer.
“I’ll tell him you’re here. That’s all I can do. No promises.”
Several minutes passed. From my forced post I could still see inside the glass doors, of course, down the hallway and off to the right side not very far to his office door also on the right. Principal Druid was not only present but also poking his head and torso out his portal as he spoke to his assistant to peer at me from time to time standing out there on the sidewalk. Then Principal Druid strode toward me.
“You’re Zane Truemaier’s mother?”
“I am. May I have a word with you, Sir, in your office?”
“I don’t believe that’ll be possible. I am not at liberty to speak with you.”
“I beg your pardon?” Again, I am begging pardons here.
“I have orders, a court order.” He turned to go back inside.
“But, Mr. Druid, no. You don’t. That couldn’t be.”
He stopped. Principal Druid turned back around to me just a little and over his shoulder as controlling men often do with subordinate, such lesser‑than, sacrificed women, condescended to address me without so much as the respect to fully face mine, “We have a file on you. In it is an order. Well, a copy of one. If you’re not aware of it, that’s one thing; but if you’re arguing with me, I will not debate you. The order looks legitimate to me so it stands and takes precedence, and I and all of our teachers will obey it.”
The King had decreed, I thought, and O All They Who Must Obey … bowed––er, kowtowed. “Please I don’t mean to argue, I don’t. I just want to see the order. If it’s what I’m thinking of. Then I’ll leave, Mr. Druid. I promise.”
“Hmmm. Come on. I’ll show it to you. But, remember, you promised to leave.” Very, very well did I note: the exact same shun as that of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier when, long ago it now seemed, Husband Herry had ever deigned to speak to me: only the nondescript ‘you’ appellation in addressing me and never, ever my name––first one or last––could … or would … daMan utter. Several pairs of eyes inside statue‑still heads bearing mostly brunette bouffant dos swiveled in the direction of the marching pair that was Principal Druid and me moving over and in to the schoolmaster’s office.
Inside a piled‑high and strewn suite on top of a number of stacks right in the very middle of his desk leaving no room, I thought, for him to write anything down was a simple, cream‑colored, standard manila file folder with four bold, black‑marker letters in huge font upon its front: T R U E. Principal Druid picked it up and, without shuffling much at all, found exactly what he had apparently meant and handed it to me. Indeed, it was Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor’s basic paragraphs of intentionally bequeathing all power over to Herry, that one sheet out of the 21 September 1990 decree––of the vaguest convolutions for directives, I had always thought. I feigned a reading interest, not requiring to really go over this one, of course, since I already could recite the damn page from memory; but I tried to buy time in order to think of something hugely impressive or important enough which might open up the Boys’ summer to me and that I could use to sway this man. My thinking, though wandering, eye caught sight of the edge of something else sticking out of the folder, out of my Urbandale High School folder. About an inch of it. It appeared to be newsprint.
Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive had been by … moments before my arrival … at the high school’s front entrance.
A school day and Dr. Edinsmaier gone out of town, of course, Herry seemed to have in place and working most efficiently his folie à deux with Next‑Cunt‑in‑His‑Stash McLive. I have no idea but it is quite likely that when she got the telephone call informing her that a woman had been seen around the school’s pool asking questions about the Truemaier Boys, why, the Nottingham Sheriff didn’t even first have to call and check in with the King as to what Herod wanted Ms. Fannie Issicran to do about it all. With prearranged dicta from him, Next‑Cunt McLive probably knew immediately––and I mean: full‑tilt boogie––of just what to grab copies and right away deliver over to the Truemaier Boys’ latest principal and other school officials. In case of “need”, jya’ know, Jury.
Fingering the order page and holding the sheet outstretched to return it to his hand I noted, “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from with this, Mr. Druid. I also see that someone else has been here, too. Before me.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Did she bring it here herself or was it received anonymously in your mail?”
“The order?”
“Come on, Mr. Druid. Come’n . You know about what I mean, now don’t you? The newspaper article.
Did you read it? Did you read it clear through?”
Principal Druid, taller than I by about six or seven inches, this time engaged squarely down into my azure eyes; and there may have been, just maybe there was, a slight, ever so slight tinge of “Shit, I’m so sorry for you, Ma’am” in those brown ones of his, “She brought it by this morning about an hour before you showed up. Yes, I’ve read it. It is bad, real bad. The order I’ve had for a while. That? That came in the mail.”
I wasn’t dazed anymore, of course, but turning my gaze away from his, my chin dropped. And an aaaah‑huh sigh, just one, escaped through my nostrils, both of my lips closed between my upper and lower teeth. “I, ah, I’m, um, I’m gonna hafta ask you to leave now and not come back. I trust you won’t be back, right? I mean … not ever.”
I wasn’t. I never saw Principal Druid nor the people of the Urbandale High School nor my Zane there. Ever. More salt poured onto a wound so deep it would never, never heal. –– All thanks to the Good and Wonderful Healer, King Herod Edinsmaier.
More I rocked.
[to be continued…]
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: Legion’s husband/Sperm Source [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Zane 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]
Mary Jane: daughter of Fannie Issicran McLive; stepsister of Zane, Jesse, and Mirzah
Legion’s Friends: Margaret, Mona, Yanira, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl, Abraham (Quaker elder), Frieda
Legion’s Best Friends: Ms Grace and Dr Lionel Portia and Rachel
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 first Family Court lawyer
Carlotta Klutz: Legion’s second Family Court attorney
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”]
Rex: Jesse’s pet Eastern Florida Kingsnake, female
Lady: Zane's pet Zebra Finch, female
Madonna: realtor
Larry Brouhaha: court-mandated marriage counselor
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: District Court judge on first two trials
Judge Harley Butcher: District Court judge for third trial
Dr. Shark: Herry’s residency supervisor who fired him
Carrie Canard: twice judge-mandated custody evaluator
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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