Welcome to Part 2 of this special 3-part Upside-Down Edition of There’s a Poem in That: I’m Todd Boss.
Brooks has invited me back to her home for a second visit, the very next day. She’s still barefoot. But she’s had her hair done. It swirls in a frothy Jane Fonda.
This time, we sit in her living room, she on a well-worn armchair, me on a well-worn couch… the windows open to an unseasonably warm January day..
We get right into it.
B: I've been a member of 12 step programs now for up 37 years. Great. So sober for close to 37 Yeah, coming up in April and also in Al Anon. Amazing. So working, I. Does that amaze
you?
T: Well, that's a long time. It is a long time. That's it is a long time. You've
won a lot of medals. You've earned a lot of pins.
B: Well I don't know about that. I have a lot of bruises - I know that.
The awkwardness is gone, and something like intimacy has settled into our conversation...
And I can feel the different the two different energies inside of myself.
And before I know it, Brooks is telling me she has multiple selves – different personas she calls ego states.
The aggressive in your face AA part of me.
Her name's Ruby by the way, she’s about 15 years old.
And she'll, she'll sooner tell you to fuck off than anything.
And Ruby’s got company. Brooks also a passive aggressive, manipulative self…
B: She's sly. Oh, she's because she's clever,
T: slippery,
B: slippery. Um, she'll come around the back door and get what she wants.
T: manipulative you said, wow
B: Very much so
T: Gosh well, neither of these sound very pleasant to be around.
B: Oh no, but they're not. They're not, they're not fun at all, and they're there. They're in my wiring.
T: Yeah, good for you for identifying.
And then there's Connie.
I'm driving back from Pagosa Springs.
Connie is the first ego state Brooks became aware of, when…
Had a wonderful time there, driving on a mountain road like this, just higher than a kite,
twenty-five years ago….
close to manic, as it's turning out. I didn't know that, but just not very grounded,
Brooks was in a car accident…
and there's a slow car in front of me, so I go to pass it, and I don't make the turn,
yeah, and I go off, off the road, down into a bar ditch. I missed a concrete culvert by about two feet. the window was open about this big as the car is doing that, I see her disembodied slip out the window and she said, bye, bye. This is no fun
Some people see their lives flash before them. Brooks, in her manic, altered state, saw herself slipping away…
So I called her disconnect, and then I renamed her connect Connie, because I have spent close to 30 years now coming back doing whatever I need to do to stay embodied.
The most recent ego state that has made itself known to Brooks is a little boy – about six years old…
And he came to me in a dream, and he ran over a hill. He's got overalls, blue overalls on and and boots like galoshes, kinds of boots. He runs up to me, says not a word, he kicks me in the shin, and he turns around, and he runs off over the hill. What's his name? Blue Boy, I call him back down here. Blue Boy, oh. Blue Boy, oh, blue boy. He appears now the cool thing is about Blue Boy, what I know about him now is that he loves the outdoors. Uh huh. Loves being outside. Okay? He's out in the garden. Yeah, a lot, yeah. And he's obviously not very verbal. He doesn't know how to express express himself, and yet, he wants to be known.
I never know quite what to make of it when people talk of embodiment or disembodiment. I personally feel pretty damn present in my body, I don’t know how I could feel more present in my body. And I’ve had one or two experiences that I might, poetically speaking, call out-of-body. But I doubt we share a language here. So I ask her about it.
Now my mother, I'm quite sure, because of how she acted, was totally dissociated most of the time, I'd say all of the time, In 45 she married, quote, the love of her life. He goes off to Europe and he gets killed. and she moved to Little Rock, where she had spent summers growing up with her grandmother. And there she met my dad, and he was a handsome Fly Boy in the Air Force. So Sam died in the spring of 45 dad courts her that summer, and by that December, they're married. You know, she's got no inclination or opportunity to grieve, and she's thinking that she has told me this, she had told me this, what I saw was the guys going off to war, getting killed. So I better take what I could get, and then she gets pregnant with me in Colorado in February. and I'm born in November of 46 in a snowstorm, Dad drives her to the hospital, drops her off. It's, I don't know if there's an air base hospital or what, but the doctor wasn't there. He drives off to go get the doctor, and the nurse is there and delivers me. And when the nurse brings she must, Mom must have had a block or some, some such, some kind of anesthesia, because I'm still processing that stuff out of my body. The nurse brings in the baby me wrapped in a pink blanket. Mom takes one look at me, and she says, Oh, that's not my baby. My husband wanted a boy, so I'm all set for dissociation. Oh, yeah. I came in with that programming, yeah, and the physicality to make sure that that happened,
yeah.
T: It must have done a number on you to learn that. Or maybe it fit.
B: No, it didn't. I mean, on its surface, yes, jarring. But then under then it's like, Oh, that explains everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
T: It fits.
B: It makes everything fit
One of the ways Brooks tries to keep herself embodied is by doing improv.
I started taking improv probably 10 years ago.
What I discovered is, I'm wired for extroversion. I'm moving towards introversion.
T: Do you perform?
B: No. I can. But i learn. I mean I can, but I don’t. Cos I don’t want to. But What I'm learning through improv is amazing life skills
During one class, there was a guy that Brooks took an immediate dislike to.
I’m thinking that one particular guy, oh shit I don't want to play with him. I don't want to play with him. I don't want to play with him
I'm standing all the way over here against the wall, and this guy, this guy runs all the way across the stage to me, and he said, here I have an arm. Here's an arm. I'm giving you an arm. And I was so disgusted with the violence, And I just looked at him and I said, No, boom, just shut the energy down, just completely.
T: Nope, not playing with you.
None of the “Yes, and” for me, so I go with that incident to my therapist, and she said, Okay, Brooks, let's talk about that. How could you –what are some of the other ways of handling that? and and that exactly is what I'm learning, is other ways to handle an offering.
That's why I'm doing this. Is so I can see my patterns.
Brooks shows me around the crooked, rambling, enchanted garden that first drew me to her.
This is St John's wort. And many, many years ago, about 40, a young high school kid was because all of this was grass, because I had kids, and they were used the yard to play in, but he completely mowed it to the ground, the grass down the St John's Wort, like it was gone. And it's such a survivor. And also this tree
Her majestic oak isn’t doing so well. Death comes for everything.
Something shifted under there, something shifted. And anyway, we had a tree doctor coming out. Yeah, so it looks like it's thriving, even though, well, thriving is not quite the right word here, surviving barely, and I'm keeping the structure even though this one is completely dead, I keep it because it embraces my bedroom and it feel it gives it feels like a great detection. Energetically, I could see in your face how much you love it. I do and look at this piece right here, yeah, like a, like a Tarzan's vine or something, as the bark drops off [fade out / use as background ambi]
It’s an urban backyard, the neighbor’s houses are just a few feet away. But Brooks loves it out here so much, she’s installed a working bathtub.
So this is what we're doing here. I Oh, it's Wow, okay, right. So ordinarily, all of this is open and I can sit here in a wonderful tub. Slowly, I know, Wow, great. You use it as a kind of a greenhouse for this winter. I'm, yeah, I'm trying it out to see if this will work. So here you've got a clap tub, and you've got running water out here, yes, and you just hot and cold, and you just fill it up and sit and listen to the wind and the trees and watch all the green.[fade out / use as background ambi]
Back inside, Brooks tells me her sign…
I'm a Scorpio.
…the serpent shedding its skin. The Phoenix rising from the ashes…
I, at least this lifetime, I've had those feelings of continuity, endings and beginnings and endings and beginnings and scorpions are constantly in transformation. There's not a plateau.
A woman always in a state of flux might well resent me for trying to pin her down…
They're probably the most difficult to get along with.
private, very private and protective, and which is one of the reasons why I've seen to be dealing in the couple of times that we've been together with trust issues here, like how I'm also extremely aware of the power of the microphone, right? You know, she who has the mic has the power,
I’ve come barging into her life with two microphones: the one I’m recording her with, and the one I’ve already recorded her with: the poem I wrote for her three years ago. For a poem is a kind of microphone. It amplifies a voice and records it.
It’s not fair, is it, what I’ve been up to, here. I should go.
But then, all of a sudden… she grants me permission.
B: I would love to hear your poem.
And because I have the power of the microphone, you’re going to hear it again, only now you get to imagine how she might hear it.
Read poem 2nd time
That is delicious, just delicious. Couldn't wait to share with you just delicious and delightful. Thank you. And you say you don't know what a Scorpio is. Give me a break. How
is Scorpio in here? How?! What do you see? And I have yet to see her face. And then you describe all the ways that you can't see me. Butt first sunbonnet, where sunbonnet, but whatever? Yeah, I think I might have been invented, who knows what, shielded by the front porch. You've got three really wonderful, um, four images. Oh, that's right, four with a hammock. Every single image in here is about my being hidden, lost in your garden or well hidden from the general public, and then the tree from the lower branches of her life, of which, owing to its worthy genes and old age and a bowed carriage and its easy spread, shares its earthy aromas and shady deeps with all of us grateful neighbors and strangers and sleeps.
B: delightful, delicious. Thank you.
T: Good. You approve?
B: Oh, absolutely, yes.
Makes me smile
This is usually the point in our show when the story wraps up. But in this upside-down episode, it’s where everything comes unraveled.
B: The awkwardness that I have felt.. In our exchanges… A little discomfort because I don't know – I’ve forgotten what ground I'm playing on
T: You're playing into a blind, right?
B: Because I didn't initiate this,
T: yeah, no, I know it's a real risk for both of us…
B: Scorpios, are really good at risk. I mean, we have to be.
T: I love that you embraced it. I got a call from you the very next day.
B: You know, I did. I'm curious, yeah,
She seems to be drawing back, pulling away from the poem, already, disappearing, maybe, even, into the meta-questions of our situation. Or is she coming closer to me?
B: And you've spent lots of your time and energy listening to me, flatteringly, listening to me, listening to me, well,
And so I've had to dance with my ego all those little pieces that I was telling you about
Agree or disagree: To listen to someone intently is to test their ego.
And so for me, part of it is the obscurity is: am I playing in a podcast structure, or am I making a new friend? I think it can be both, and I think this is a yes and.
I wrote the poem from afar – from a place of assumption – more for myself of course, than for her …
What I would wonder is, what if you wrote another poem?
T: I’ve thought about that, it may yet happen. I don't rule out that there may be another poem in this.
B: How will you know if you ruled it in?
How will I know if I’ve ruled it in?
B: I’m stating that, so far at least, I'm willing to explore a friendship.
T: I feel the same way.
This phoenix, this serpent, deserves more than I bargained for.
At this age, I can't afford to let it simmer too long.
The leaves have parted. She’s asking to be seen even more clearly.
And, and I'm also wary of hastiness.
Don’t go quite yet, she seems to be saying.
There's much more richness in slowing down.
Slow down and stay with us for the concluding episode in this upside-down three-part series, up next.
