Read Online Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice - Free Book Online

another Ritalin an hour ago and it’s still ticking away in my blood. Julia is in my bed, surely asleep by now. She said she’d wait up for me so we could have sex, but she always conks out early. She’s been staying over a lot lately. She says it’s because her place has a mold problem but I think she’s trying move in. We’ve been dating long enough, I suppose it’s a natural next step, but it’s strange that she’s going about it in such an oblique way. I’m perfectly fine with the idea of living with her. I’m not doing the typical intimacy-avoidance guy thing. I like intimacy; after all, women I date are often impressed by the fact that I enjoy providing oral sex. If I seem hesitant to let Julia move in, it’s out of concern for Chris. The last thing he needs is to become attached to another mother figure who will abandon him. He’s already been through that. It’s been three years since his mother died, and he’s still vulnerable. It was a sudden thing, so the grieving process takes longer and is more jagged and chaotic. Had Brenda died of some terrible illness, after months in a hospital bed with tubes stuck in her vital parts, Chris would have had all that time to come to terms with death. But it was a simple car accident that did it, Brenda’s little Honda cruising obliviously in the blind spot of an eighteen-wheeler that wanted to change lanes. So, just like that, she was gone, and Chris, whom I’d gotten to know only a little during the seven or eight months Brenda and I dated, had nowhere to go. Brenda had no family to speak of, sowhen it looked like Chris was headed for foster care, I stepped in. At first things were great. Women nearly fell over themselves when I told them this story, their genitals swelling up to the size of catcher-mitts, like baboons in estrus. But when I would bring one home, Chris’s acting out—especially his refusal to respect the standard necktie-on-the-doorknob code—would drive my date away. Chris was both the biggest lady-bait and cock-blocker a middle-age bachelor could have. Of course, I knew his behavior was simply coming from grief, from his reluctance to get hurt by any of these women. Which is why it bothers me so much—why I feel a pang of fear for Chris—when I see Julia trying to ingratiate herself with him, buying him those concert tickets for his birthday a couple weeks ago, a suspiciously excessive gesture. Sure, he was happy at the time, but, as I tried to explain to Julia later, he doesn’t have any friends and when he realizes that he has no one to give the second ticket to he’ll resent her. Plus, he still feels abandoned by his mother, I said, so if he attaches himself to you, he’ll only get hurt, which is why for his birthday I bought him the far more appropriate (and Pulitzer Prize–winning) The Denial of Death by Dr. Ernest Becker. Tomorrow, Julia’s taking him to see the new Mission Impossible movie and then dinner at Planet Hollywood, and I really need to sit him down and explain how he’s only going to get hurt here, how he should really be keeping her at arm’s length. It’s all there in the book, I’ll explain, how he’s vulnerable and too eager to latch on to another mother figure.
    Oddly enough, Edie also references The Denial of Death when she writes about Mom dying. The book was published some thirteen years after the fact, but she claims it helped her “make sense of our orphaning” (230). I’d like to point out, however, that the sense shemakes is more self-aggrandizement than self-awareness. For instance, she uses me—me!—as an example of what Becker identifies as the “anal” personality, trying to distance himself against the reality of death. Of course, she hurls this diagnosis at me only in order to make herself seem like the picture of mental health by comparison, and it’s a completely