Flapjack Is Blackmailed
“Well, I’ve been thinking” …
When Flapjack got home from the hotel, she found Thunder lying — or is that laying? — on the couch watching TV.* He was watching Mr. Bean, one of their favourite TV shows back in the nineties, which says a lot about their sense of humour. That he was watching Mr. Bean communicated this common bond, which dissipated Flapjack’s fury, just a little. In fact, before she said one single word to him about his multiple betrayals the night before and let’s face it, over time and long before, she squished herself into the remaining little bit of couch, right beside Thunder’s big size 20 (ha ha, more like size 13) feet to watch a bit of Mr. Bean with him.
Just to share Flapjack’s mental space on that strange and useless day (I’ve overused “walk in her shoes”), here’s the episode they watched together:
At first they laughed like in the old days, but they couldn’t keep their laughing up. When Mr. Bean dropped from the high board into the kid-filled pool and lost his bathing trunks, doggy-paddled in search of them, then ended up running stark naked past a gaggle of mocking girls, Flapjack said “Poor Mr. Bean,” and Thunder agreed, showing his gentle side which she liked so much and regardless of everything else he had done or would do in the future always would. Liked his gentle side, that is.
She peeked out the window to check on Coconut who was pulling out the grass on their scraggly lawn and boring out holes in the ground with a kitchen spoon. Coconut was preparing for a marbles game with the Dennis the Menace look-alike’s next door. That gave Flapjack about an hour to tell Thunder she’d had enough of coping with his moods and various and sundry depressions and perversions, never mind his impact on Coconut which together with her own questionable parenting skills was having an effect.
So it was she resumed her squished-in place at the foot of the couch, cleared her throat and said, “Well, I’ve been thinking … ”
* Let’s settle this LYING/LAYING nonsense once and for all … remember that lie means to recline, whereas lay means to place something, to put something on something. Lie means that the actor (subject) is doing something to himself or herself. Excerpted from the Wonderful World of Words
“I’m not a therapist” …
.jpg)
“I hope this isn’t the start of You Need Medication speech,” he said flatly. “You know I don’t live by your judgment or anyone else’s.” His eyes were dull with anger or sadness, it was hard to say which. “And you know I tried lithium once. It just made my hair fall out. So, spare yourself the effort.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to go there. I’m not a therapist. And I have my own issues, I’m not going to lie. But after last night I’ve had it.
“Glad to hear you realize you’re not a therapist.” He changed the station from Mr. Bean to the O.J. Simpson case which he followed obsessively, disregarding the gravity of the crime and taking glee in the ineptitude of the police.
“Well, I wasn’t going to go there,” Flapjack raised her voice to drown out CNN, which was just breaking into the big time with the then-novelty of breaking news. Here’s a snippet of the O. J. case:
“As I was saying,” Flapjack yelled above the news. “I’m not a therapist. I have my own issues, just wondering if we could talk … .”
“Glad to hear you realize you’re not a therapist,” he said again, as if he’d listen to her if she was. He didn’t turn the volume down, he turned it up.
“Yeah, really. I’ve been thinking,” she yelled even louder above the news. “I’ve been thinking that it’s just not working. It’ll be best if I leave with Coconut …”
He turned the volume up even louder.
Wow, Thunder could be such an asshole. It’s incomprehensible how she had ended up with such a man. But the truth is he wasn’t just one man. He wasn’t even two men. He was four, which lay at the root of how complicated this whole fiasco was.
Here are the four Thunders laid out nice and neat, in black and white, only grasped at a distance, with the perfect vision of looking at things long past, not available to Flapjack at the time:
| Man # 1 — Thunder the Swaggish | Man # 2 — Thunder the Maniac |
|
|
| Man # 3 – Thunder the Sensitive | Man # 4 – Thunder the Mean |
|
|
“But I don’t have a diary” …
“Yeah, really. I’ve been thinking,” Flapjack insisted. “I’ve been thinking that it’s just not working. It’ll be best if I leave with Coconut …”
“Not so fast,” Thunder mumbled. “Your name is on the mortgage.”
“So, you can it take it off. I obviously can’t move out and keep paying into our … your mortgage.”
“You know I’ll lose the house without your name on it. So I don’t want you to take your name off. It’s that simple.”
“This is anything but simple … maybe you don’t know but I know…”
“Know what?”
“I know you go to see a dominatrix.”
“Oh spare me. I know you broke into her apartment.”
“Well, not exactly broke in. I had a key.”
“Which wasn’t given to you. You were obviously trespassing. ”
“And how did her key get into your couch? And how do you know I was there if you weren’t there, too? Ha.”
“None of that matters,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll be bringing it up again once you’ve read this. You see, I’ve written it all down.” He handed Flapjack a photocopied handwritten document. which itemized not his secrets, but hers.
Here’s an example, Item # 5, to give you the gist:
I have worried about my littlest sister for a very long time. First of all, her birth was fraught with family politics. If my mom hadn’t been pregnant with her she would have divorced my dad. Dad was having an affair … Mom found out about the affair from dad’s secretary, who lived across the street from us and who liked everyone in my family except for me (did she know I had x-ray vision into the human soul?). She told my mom that dad had set up a private telephone line for a woman. I caught my parents fighting about this so many times that every fight has merged in my mind as ONE HORRIFIC FIGHT which ends with my mom bringing us all into the living room and saying, ‘Your father and I are going to divorce. Now is your chance to say if you want to leave with your father. Who wants to go with daddy?’ “Me,” I pipe up. “I want to go with dad.” No one else says a word. Because everyone is terrified of my Viking Queen Mother. And of course I am afraid of her, too, but this is great, I tell myself. I can be free of her. I can go with dad. I run upstairs to get my stuff (a few pairs of shorts and t-shirts and underwear), but by the time I get back downstairs dad has left.
My older sister and I peer out the window to watch him leave in his car. He has his suitcase in the trunk of the Chevy. Anyways, backs out the driveway, drives around the block and comes back home. Even though I’m still a kid, I realize something very momentous has happened. I have laid my cards on the table. My mother knows I do not love her, that even worse I love her mortal enemy, her husband, my dad. I will never be forgiven this betrayal …
But my littlest sister got it worse. She carried a reminder of this big mess her whole life. And she didn’t have our dad as an ally like I did. ”
Excerpted from the Private Diary of _____. Also goes by the name of Flapjack.
“But I don’t have a diary, Thunder.” I haven’t had one since I was 18 and I threw that in the garbage when I was 24… so …”
“Read on …”
Flapjack was what you call a squeamish reader, letting her eyes just swish past the difficult parts to get the overall idea — like when Gus Macrae in Lonesome Dove chooses to die from a poison arrow rather than have his legs amputated, or when the political prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman is being tortured, or when the little sister in Fall on Your Knees is being raped by her father who is holding her on his lap. All she needed was the gestalt to feel the horror. Well, that’s how she read the document that Thunder handed her. Her eyes just swished past the words, oh all 20 000 of them approximately, though she did read Item #7 with some attention:
I can only have sex with any kind of enthusiasm if I am drunk …
I am either totally promiscuous or I am nun-like. I will zero-in on a physical trait like arched eyebrows which indicate perpetual surprise and repel me because who but someone with no life’s experience or intelligence would always be surprised? Or tone of voice — high-pitched voices have always disturbed me, linking back, I am pretty sure, to the high-pitched voice my Heart-broken Mother used to speak for my mentally retarded sister who couldn’t speak. ‘Do you want to play baseball,” she squeaked at the kitchen table, a ventriloquist on my sister’s behalf, and we, the so-called normal sisters, would have to say Yes we did, trying not to notice that my sister was tied to her high chair so as not to fall out. Arrogance puts me off too, and that is related to my Chip-on-the-Shoulder Mother who was laughed at as a poor kid in an English boarding school for having shabby clothes and who taught us to hate anyone who was too big for their britches, including ourselves more often than not. On the other side of it, excessive humility was another thing that made my skin crawl — “Don’t crawl before those Nazis, walk like a man!” — and this had to do with my Jewish father fresh from World War II who tended to be obsequious to anyone in a uniform, even to guards at the Detroit border …
Or get this, having a life plan turned me off, because, well, the plan implied you could raise yourself above your fate and would end in disaster anyways…
All families take prisoners and mine certainly did. So, rather than tempt fate, I bypassed relationships with men who had ambitions and plans for themselves and the women they got involved with (including, potentially, me). I could go and on and on about things about a person that would remind me of bigger things in life, the biggest of all being my fate, and so I would run away, even if on every other criteria that person was a perfect match for me, and that would probably mean a nice-looking, smart man from a good family with professional ambitions.
Outside this category there were still lots of fish in the sea and that’s where I found my so-called partners.
What kind of species am I? Am I even Homo Sapiens? I’m probably closer to “Homo Ridens” “in the category of humans as the only species known to understand comedy.” But the more I think about this, the more I realize that I need to locate my species much more precisely than that. I am a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-species of Homo Ridens.
Are cats and dogs and parrots and elephants and camels and tigers and snakes and raccoons as finely variegated as we are, we human beings, even within the sub-category of Homo Ridens?
Well, that was pretty much my excuse for MY PROMISCUITY.
I was such a rare species that I had to trudge on and on in search of a mate, dallying with short men, tall me, smart men, stupid men, serious men, funny men, rich men, poor men, homegrown men, foreign men – all kinds of men as long as they were not MIDDLE CLASS PROFESSIONALS, MOST PARTICULARLY IN THE MEDICAL FIELD LIKE MY FATHER.
Excerpted from the Private Diary of ______. Also goes by the name of Flapjack.
In a nutshell, Items #1 through #6 nailed every single last member of Flapjack’s family as dysfunctional in various significant, hurtful, painful ways, and Item # 7 nailed Flapjack herself as a pretentious fucked-up promiscuous twit. Really, Homo Ridens?????
So when Thunder said, “I’ve lost too much already. So don’t even try to take your name off the mortgage. What you saw or thought you saw last night will be the least of your problems. I’ve made copies and I’ll mail one to your parents, your sisters, the school, your doctor, whoever ….”
Flapjack said, “I can’t believe this is actually my life and not someone else’s.”
“Welcome to reality,” Thunder said.
“So, basically, you’re blackmailing me over a lousy 20 G?”
“Basically.”
“What if Coconut and I moved out, and I still paid my share of the mortgage.”
” I doubt if you can swing it, but sure, and don’t forget to take your cat.”
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Love is the skilful audacity required to share an inner life.” Gertrude Stein
Love is the sloppy emotion that gets you to spill the beans.” Flapjack
Damn, what a genius counter-attack! Let’s dwell for a moment on the man who came up with it. Well, the four men who came up with it.
First of all, all four Thunders were clever. They all had the same PhD (in psychology), the same financial problems (it’s never easy to be bankrupted not once but three times), the same grown-up children (all of whom disapproved of Flapjack), the same dead eye when it came to billiards and basketball (just to give an example of this multiple man’s many skills and talents). And they all liked Mr. Bean (as previously alluded to).
But the thing to emphasize here is that Thunders #1 & 3 were good, you might say exceptional, listeners. The gentle Thunder, AKA # 3, was just brilliant in the way he asked second- and third- and fourth-order questions which sucked the truth out of a person like a vacuum cleaner. This was the Thunder who seemed to want to know who Flapjack REALLY WAS because he loved her so much. This was the Thunder who quoted Gertrude Stein, egging Flapjack on to confess her innermost thoughts and feelings, to reveal THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY of her life to date, and be accepted and understood. This was the Thunder who passed on the content for the blackmail document to the mean inert Thunder, AKA #4, who actually wrote it.
Damn, what a genius counter-attack! Perhaps Flapjack had not literally written the diary but she had generated its content. Because no-one else knew all this stuff but her. Her and Thunder, that is.
It was pretty obvious that Thunder’s brain chemistry was not exactly normal, but Flapjack’s brain chemistry wasn’t exactly normal either. She was flailing about and bouncing around like a … like a …. like an arcade pinball. Hours earlier she had imagined making Thunder fall in love with her again, then while stuck in the closet of the dominatrix and hearing his small-child suffering her heart almost broke for him, and then when they watched Mr. Bean together she felt nostalgic about the good ol’ days and now she hated him with a fury that felt like hot poison rushing through her veins.
She ran out of the house to find Coconut, a seven-year old girl cast adrift with her mother and her cat in the storms of a mid-life love affair headed straight to hell.
Vengeance
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Romans 12:19 King James Version
“Hey Coconut,” Flapjack called out when she spotted the feisty seven-year old. She was heading a phalanx of little bicycles with trainer wheels, wagons and tricycles down the street, outfitted with a silver set of cap guns and a Zorro hat sitting jauntily atop her head.
“Hey, mom,” Coconut called out. “Watch me shoot Sam!”
As Flapjack watched Coconut turn around on her bike to shoot off her cap guns at Sam who was hiding behind a bush with a few weapons of his own, among them a plastic rifle and a rubber tomahawk, she got an idea.
As Flapjack watched Sam fall backwards into the grass, yelling and writhing in his imitation of what it would be like to die, that idea took a little more root.
As Sam fell suddenly silent and still, Flapjack couldn’t help it. She visualized Thunder in Sam’s place.
A real villain for a fake villain.
A real gun for a fake gun.
She was so full of hate for the man she had once upon a time loved that she saw Thunder dead. Period. Swear to almighty fucking God.
Read next: THE FRANK PLAN