Foley's Follies (II)

Despite deciding to keep her mother’s Jewish maiden name and renounce much of the ghettoness she associated with her father’s more traditionally work-hard Black surname, Coolidge, Loana Myers’ ancestry and family circumstances reminded Foley of his mother’s—stereotypically stern, patriarchal ebony-skinned father and submissive to the point of servility, emotionally labile, fair-skinned mother.

Sigmund Freud, whose work Foley was familiar with as a result of the knowledge-dropping common his first serious girlfriend practiced on him, would’ve had a field day with therapeutic interventions on behalf of Foley’s romantic situation—classic love the mother, kill the father psychoanalytic fare, but Foley wasn’t completely blind to his predicament. He didn’t necessarily torment Loana Myers because he felt antipathy toward her as a woman, or a human being. He felt his major and minor abuses of her were in some way or other karmic payback for the dissolute behavior he believed had Loana inflict him with Dukkha, or, Nigger dookie, as he liked to joke with friends.

Foley spent hours galore boning up on spiritual knowledge while in prison, but he never turned his back on his mother’s religious faiths. Though Melva Carbajal occasionally resorted to santería practices like smoking cigars to exhale curses on Raimundo Guzmán—a Salvadorean neighbor who always insisted he was no relative of the first reported narco-terrorista, El Güapo, whenever other neighbors asked—she was also a staunch admirer of the Pope and communion. Unlike his mágia católica negra—or black-magic Catholic—mother, Foley believed that doing unto neighbors as you’d like them do unto you was a worthy practice, the kind that would get you into heaven if there were such a paradisiacal salsa mansion in the sky.

On cold nights after his mother would utter maldiciones against Raimundo, who lived on the other side of a cinder block wall separating his property from that of Melva and her children, Foley would imagine sprinkling holy water or burning frankincense and myrrh in his vecinos’ patios early the next morning to atone for his mother’s tendency to practice Isla Comunacha sorcery whenever lack of neighborliness brought her, frothing, to wits’ end.

Foley had not inherited his Ubuntu grandfather’s hot-headed Y chromosome, so he attributed his own flashes of temper to Melva’s ability to linguistically carve people she felt had wronged her into lesser beings who ended up cowering in corners to avoid further verbal butchering.

The times Foley had tested his beloved Loana’s kindness and patience with the rages inherited from his mother were many. The following were some of the most painfully memorable:

First there was the occasion he tried to clear Loana’s home of all property he felt was unnecessary and suffocating clutter.This occurred shortly after Foley and Loana were reunited following Gaspers’ release from the Aurum State’s Department of Corrections and Recovery (ASDCR) where they had met. At the time Loana was a nurse practitioner, 28 years young and Foley a detainee, aged an even younger twenty. The slightly heavy-set, mocha-skinned, Pocahantas-locked professional had started her compulsive collecting habit during a relationship with Jerome O’Hare, a ne’er do good who she had straightened out, but who had walked out on Loana one morning after no longer being able to stomach an unidentifiable dark spiritual presence lurking in Loana’s home.

After Foley was released from ASDCR, he was quick to reconnect with Loana, but dismayed by the condition of the house she owned in Heritage Park. Ceding to his stepson’s urgent demands to restore a semblance of sanity to the single-storied, pitched-roof, two-bedroom residence, Foley’s stepfather rented a dumpster. Melva came over to lend her aging hands. Gaspers hired a couple of immigrants waiting to be paid sub-minimum wages in the Home-Max Remodeling parking lot to assist with the Herculean clean up.

Please get rid of that, Foley asked the more physically-imposing of the two hired hands in Spanish, pointing at a soiled love-seat preferred by Shangri-El for slothful repose. Benny, the bullish-looking hired mule, stole a glance at Loana, who responded with a, no dear that specimen stays, it belongs to my deceased granmamá.Foley continued to point out items he considered junk—a brown aluminum softball bat, a couple of high-tensile strength steel bike chains, a box containing eight spray cans of extra-toxic insecticide—but on each occasion, after Loana and the mule briefly locked peepers, she objected.

Before Melva drove him away from the scene for accusing Loana and Benny of collusion and sabotage, Foley removed his belt and struck Loana with it three times. Three was the nurse practitioner’s favorite number. He had used the same belt to once gently lash their dog with one drunk morning, thinking the Shih-Tzu Shangri-El’s wanderlust represented what he was obdurately convinced was Loana’s own wandering commitment.

A dogcatcher brought a shivering Shangri-El back home, just the way Foley had been brought shivering back to the suburban country house, over and over again by something he couldn’t explain after being kicked out by Loana each time he detonated one of his borderline-schiz bombs on the nurse practitioner.

Another torment Foley inflicted on his partner included accelerating away in her car, intent on jumping off the pier at Florencia Beach. He could have killed Loana since she was standing outside the driver door, holding on fast to the steering wheel through the open window, the only thing causing her to lose her grip being his gunning the gas while not giving a damn whether she ended up dead or injured under the old Corolla’s wheels.

Once he arrived at the beach, he didn’t make it to the pier but spent a night in the Florencia Beach jail for being disorderly and drunk.

The Corolla was impounded, so after being released, Gaspers begged for change to get on a bus to go downtown and find a homeless shelter where he could spend a few nights.

I saw it again, he said to the perplexed shelter staff during intake, referring to the Corvus flock that landed on the couples’ front yard to wreak havoc on the polyethylene lawn by scattering countless beak-shucked peanut shells and arranging small, pinkish decorative stones on exposed dirt as if the birds exhibited obsessive-compulsive antics typical of Tusi-freebasing addicts.

Denizens at the shelter in Gutter Gulch, Lost Angels’ district for vagabonds and derelicts, were more abject than any of the inmate-patients Foley had met or seen while in ASDCR. Melva had doused him with Isla Comunacha cologne for boys during his elementary school years, so Foley’s tolerance for funk had never been considerable. The stink, not to mention parasites, amongst the shelter’s inhabitants drove him to wander the down-low surrounding environs where in one instance he pilfered an energy drink as well as a pair of bedtime slippers for a bedraggled woman who hobbled the streets barefoot and using a broken sign post as a crutch.

When he was evicted from the shelter after vociferously complaining about an indigent who looked, and misbehaved, like he was as “an extra in some Golden Age Tinsel-hood flic set in stone-age Africa,” Foley relented and called his parents who told him there was no way he was coming back home and instead called his case worker who found him a board and care populated by other mental health and substance abuse casualties whose troubles, they assumed, were similar to his own.

From the window to his street-facing room in the board and care, the night he arrived Foley could hear the sounds of a party across the street. He believed the host of the party was a Congolese workmate of Loana’s, that she was the guest of honor at the grindhouse social, and that she eventually arrived and engaged in all manner of abominations with the African native.

The last travail he afflicted her with, the one that finally landed Foley behind bars with the prospects of returning to AsDecoR, as Foley liked to call the Aurum State’s recovering-penitent complex, happened after he took a pick axe to Loana’s grandfather’s high-backed rocking chair, the only heirloom the octogenarian had left to a grandchild that, unlike the other two, hadn’t ended up either a reformed Xani-binging, bougie, reality-show-emulating unhappy wife or a grifter with expensive tastes in imported cars, designer clothing and names for newborn boutique-bred felines.

After the pick axe chiseled the chair to pieces and splinters, Loana decided she had had enough; said, That’s it! No more. You’re out! For good. It was too much for Foley to accept, so in what seemed to be a last desperate measure against being abandoned, he put hands on Loana.

Afraid of what else he would do if she didn’t capitulate to his crazed demands, Loana let him spend the night, but in the morning while he took out the trash, she locked the front and kitchen doors and called the police, who promptly arrived and escorted him off the property, but not before the arresting officer, a White cop whose black uniform was emblazoned with stitched golden lettering spelling out the name Crowe, warned Foley he would get a kick from practicing his jiujitsu skills on a punk who liked to slap women around.

Hours later, laying on the bunk in his iron and cinder block cell Foley thought, I’m going right back. I’ve got to get back to her, back at her, back into her.If she doesn’t come back, I’ll kill myself. Typical borderline reasoning, said the psychologist consulted to review his psychiatric history for purposes of obtaining a mental health diversion for Gianni Cavallo, an attorney friend of Foley’s stepdad.

The judge issued a no contact order. Foley was to refrain from calling Loana, texting her, e-or snail-mailing her. He was never to approach withing 100 ft of her or any property she owned.

He heaved a sigh of relief anticipating newfound freedom if law enforcement separated the tempestuous two for good, then gasped in fear of abandonment. Where would Loana go? Who would she meet? What Smallest Big Man would step in to fill his Tiny Trig shoes?

One night, two weeks out of jail, Foley lay in bed at his mother’s house and heard his cellphone chime.

The texts were from Loana, whose tendency to mix up punctuation marks both tickled and infuriated Foley, a Heritage Park High student who had earned average grades in most coursework except for English, the language he learned to speak after being reared exclusively in Spanish by Melva.

RU there! the first of Loana’s texts demanded.

Followed by a questioning, please answer?

He didn’t. He panicked instead, and called Cavallo, a lawyer, Giuseppe “Joe” Gasparino could rely on whenever family members were in a fix. Although Joe was proud of his Italian nomenclature, he had allowed Foley to butcher the Dago surname for purposes of having a name that sounded, piú Americano, or more American, according to the immigrant from Naples.

Giuseppe’s Italian-American lawyer friend, responded to Gaspers’s exasperated, What the fuck should I do? with an, I don’t like the smell of this, Foley. You can’t trust to throw this woman any farther than you can lead her to water.

Foley was puzzled by Gianni’s mixing of maxims and metaphors, but faintheartedly agreed with the doctor of jurisprudence.

Cavallo instructed him to keep all incoming texts from Loana as evidence and warned, She’s trouble. Of the worst kind. I can feel it in my bones.

For two more weeks, the phone continued to ping nearly every night with texts from Loana. On two occasions it rang.

Foley didn’t answer, but his sole paramour left a voicemail of herself breathing heavily into her iPhone. The recording ended with impish giggles trailing into silence, then the crackly click of a connection being cut.

Whether based on fact or paranoid hunches, Foley began to worry Loana would make what Cavallo called fugazi accusations to the police—of the legally restrained domestic batterer sitting in his car in front of the battered intimate partner’s house, then driving off as soon as she caught sight of him from the front porch. Of him haunting her favorite supermarket or thrift store to catch a fleeting whiff of her.

Foley thought of alibis. Excuses. Of a thousand and one ways to avoid becoming trapped by a woman obsessed, and scornful of an insecure and mentally ill suitor’s paranoia.

It breaks my heart to hear a grown man, the son of a friend who I skewered ghutra-wearing rats with in Mohumidastan, whimper like a spoiled bitch, said Cavallo when Foley called him one night after Loana texted him that she had fed a chocolate muffin to Shangri-El, thechicken-shit-looking, but rabidly fierce lapdog they had rescued from the Heritage Park pound on Valentine’s Day, a memento to their undying, troubled and fickle love.

But she knows chocolate is poisonous to canines! replied Foley, brow furrowed and Android held arm’s distance from his spitting angst.

Possibly, but you know she’s baiting you, Foley! Cavallo shot back, once the auditory organ of his friend Giuseppe’s borderline stepson was again stuck to the cellphone’s earpiece. What you don’t know is whether officer Crowe—Mr. MMA with a badge—will show up at her house after you do, hell-bent on saving a pound puppy from cacao intoxication by putting you in an arm bar then choking you out!

Melva, Giuseppe and their son met after Loana herself infringed on the restraining order meant to protect her from the man she had seduced in a state facility for the criminally insane, then invited him into her abode. One night soon after she had lied about feeding the chocolate muffin to Shangri-El, Loana pulled up outside the Giuseppe and Melva’s home where Foley had taken refuge to avoid his well-founded delusions concerning his partner’s intent to entrap him, to keep Foley from reverting to the philandering ways of his Isla Comunacha grandfather, Dios Dado.

When the Gasparino residence doorbell rang at close to 4 am, Melva, correctly sensing it was Loana, rallied Giuseppe out of bed. Melva secretly hoped Loana Myers would be the superheroic woman to navigate Foley through the Jocasta fixation that disabled her son from abandoning the role of Black Casanova, the love-her-then-lose-her, lover-then-leaver, of all women who could not measure up to Foley’s give me a mommy, make her my eight-foot-tall- savior image.

After Giuseppe managed to convince Loana Foley was not home, that he had spent the night at Gasparino’s Auto Collision Repair for fear of Loana showing up at the house just as she was now doing, the family gathered in front of the Joe and Melva’s Citrus County home to plan Foley’s escape from Loana’s what-would-you-do-if-I-throttled-you? obsession.

Melva decided the only way her only child could avoid being set up and sent into psychiatric confinement again was if he she arranged for Foley to abscond to Isla Comunacha—not permanently, she would never want Foley to suffer her people’s deprivations, but at least until the smoke of Loana’s smoldering clinginess cleared.

The following morning Melva drove her son to the Unfederated Building for purposes of renewing the passport Foley had not used since flying to Ciudad Jose Aca on the Costa Pacifica of Mexicalandia with Persephone Panagiotis, a half Greek, half African-American girlfriend of Foley’s whom Melva had previously thought would be the only woman to whom she could cede her unstable son in good conscience.

The Unfederated Building was located in one of the few remaining swanky parts of Lost Angels called Eastwide, named after a legendary Tinseltown actor who had graduated from the University of Lost Angels, also a short drive not only from the Unfederated Building, but, to Foley’s consternation, the Aurum State Mental Health Recovery facility where Loana still worked as a nurse practitioner.

Melva, Loana can sense my perspiring presence from any distance, what makes you think she won’t appear here with a self-inflicted black eye prepared to have an Unfederated guard arrest me as the culprit responsible for another intimate partner battery?

Hijito, dearest son, what have I told you about your paranoid tendencies? Melva replied, with a gentle stroke to Foley’s shiny pale dome. When a mother truly cares for her son, she will always come between him and any maldad enemies of goodness wish upon God’s good and gifted creatures.

Though he had made a now-irreversible decision to abscond from very real, or undeniably delusional danger, Foley was again fraught with anxiety at the prospects of abandoning his mother and being abandoned by Loana. Before exiting Melva’s late-model Volkswagen sedan for the international flight terminal, Foley leaned over from his passenger’s seat and delivered a discomforting tongue kiss to his mother’s lips. Melva sighed her la vida es un martírio constante saint’s sigh and sternly reminded Foley to stop with his tonterías infantiles, or childish tomfoolery, and that he needed to be on his best behavior while in the airport, during the flight to Aeropuerto Zapatos in Ciudad Mexicolandia, adding before he closed the sedan’s front passenger door, You need to conduct yourself like the gentleman I’ve taught you to be when you finally meet with Hector—the cousin she had arranged to look after him once he arrived on Isla Comunacha, simple instructions Foley relegated to the dumping grounds of historia as soon as he sauntered outside the Hermanos Fidelio International Terminal in Melva’s natal country.

Within an hour of his arrival not only had Foley given expectant Hector the slip, he had exchanged small talk with an Isla Comunacha newspaper salesman and gifted the government media peddler one of the five-hundred high-denomination Disunion greenbacks Giuseppe had generously loaned his stepson. Foley also gifted the newspaper man with the only warm article of clothing he had bundled into his backpack, then boarded a bus headed to Compinches, a remote town a hundred-some kilometers from the capitol renowned for its rhythmic and melodic contributions to a world mesmerized by unfreedom as well as the sensual indulgences of tropicality.