A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER XIV

By Frank Moore circa 1970s

She said she would think about it. We got back to the store and Carol said she had to leave to cook dinner for her mother and brother. She left and Moe shouted from the back room “Are you still hungry? I made my special … egg on toast. It’s a shame that I am on a diet.”

“You have bookkeeping work to do. I’ll feed him,” said Debbie, taking the plate from him and coming to the front.

Debbie said to me in a quiet tone so she would not be overheard, “How did you ever get close to him … really close? I’ve been trying to get close to him, but every time that we almost get there, he throws a fucking wall up … makes a joke and puts his he-man shit in front of him.”

Debbie was different than most of Moe’s chicks. In college, they would come to me sitting in the noisy cafeteria and ask the same two basic questions: “What does he really think of me?” and “How can I get him to marry me?” I always got the Dear Abby questions. Ever since I got my board and pointer, I have been put in the role of Advisor.

Really, I just bullshit my way through questions, using what I’ve read or seen … seen from watching people. And people believed in my bullshit, my advice.

The amazing thing was that it usually worked for them. It didn’t work for me. With Moe’s would-be wives, there was nothing there except a good time for a few nights. They didn’t have what it would take to tame him. It would have taken a women to do that. And they were chicks. But Debbie was asking something different.

“I just don’t pay any attention to the wall. I can bullshit as much as he can … but I see what he needs from me … and I force it onto him, ignoring what he says,” I said.

“But he says he doesn’t need anybody except himself,” Debbie said.

“Do you really believe that?”

“Well, he is a strong guy.”

“Sure, he is strong. But he is afraid of testing his strength by letting people give to him.”

Moe was always giving to people. That was why he was so popular in college. He fit in the frat crowd as well as the freak scene because he was always giving in whatever terms the situation called for. But the moment that someone got close enough to him to really give him something, he would hop on his motorcycle with his buffalo horns on and ride alone into the sunset where freedom is supposed to be.

Moe was a master giver. But giving only took him halfway into freedom and then trapped him in his own strength. He had only himself … he wasn’t dependent on anyone … it was all right that people leaned on him. That proved that he had his shit together. But he didn’t trust people enough to depend on them, to let them give to him. Me, I just sneaked in when he wasn’t looking and as he was busy giving to me, I was giving to him in an underground way. I couldn’t give Moe all that he needed … just what was in me.

Somewhere along the line, I had learned to give up feeling guilty about always taking, always receiving and seeing I was not giving anything in return … it seemed like I wasn’t giving. I didn’t want to depend on people. I wanted to be independent, just giving to them. But that kind of independence, that kind of freedom, was impossible for me. I had to depend on people to make my living. A simple thing like depending on people to not leave me lying in a bed in a room with a closed door … forgetting me forever … me dying of thirst in my own shit and piss. People wouldn’t do that to me. They may leave me for hours and I may have to piss my pants. But in the end, they will come back and put dry pants on me. If that was the only level of my life – waiting, drinking, pissing and shitting – I still would be forced to depend on people. But as it is … how I am and how my life works, I have to take it for granted that people will be there giving. And they always are.

I sometimes felt guilty because I was using people … they gave me so much. Then I made two discoveries. The first one was the Art of Receiving … that when you let someone do something for you, giving something to you, letting him in the right way, in the way that makes him feel warm inside, you are giving him something in return, usually of more worth. And the second discovery was that everyone was just as dependent on others as I was in bed. But they didn’t know it, didn’t want to know it.

Moe could deny it. He could say he didn’t need anyone else … that he had it together, that he could go it alone and do what he wanted to do alone, that he was quite happy, thank you. When someone came into the room where I had been lying for six hours alone and asked me if I wanted to get up or take a piss, I could have said, “No.” I could have said no out of pride, not wanting to admit that there were things, that I would deserve to die in my own shit. But I could also have said no because I didn’t want to be a bother, because I was not sure if the person who came in really wanted to help me. This would be equally absurd.

But I had done this many times … out of false pride … but deeper, because I didn’t trust the person … didn’t trust that he really wanted to help me … thought he was doing it out of some kind of duty … or maybe he was angry that I pissed on the bed … maybe he didn’t really love me. So I would say no.

But this time Moe was in bed, and Debbie and I were standing in the door. We could believe him when he said no, when he said he could do things himself. We could walk out and close the door like people did before us … or we could trick him into letting us help him … trick him in such a way that he wouldn’t realize that he was being helped until afterwards, too late for him to put up the wall of pride … too late for him to feel trapped.

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