I had a chance to spend the afternoon at the County Courthouse
The drama de jour was about the violent, dramatic and very sad dance between two citizens, a story that had oozed up into the public light of day after having spent years in the dark and chaotic nights of Saturday night drunkenness and in the bright and ruined family holiday dinners. The male half of the story, we’ll call him Buck, was a tight-lipped, stern, chiseled-faced black man, known in the community as a beater of women and a seller of drugs. They had dressed Buck in an orange County jumpsuit and flip-flops, but it didn’t work. He maintained his fearsomeness and dignity in the orange better than most I have seen and the aging bailiffs were careful to always outweigh him, though it took three of them to equal one of him.
She, lets call her Tallulah, was melodramatic and self-centered, full of false pride and prone to putting on airs and fainting spells (though I noticed she never hit the floor very hard). She and Buck had done the Abuse Me/ Punish Me dance and it had gone badly, gone publicly wrong. When the po-lice (pronounced POE-leece) finally tire of spending Saturday nights at your house, sorting out the mess, they make it public. The Abuse Me/ Punish Me dance, described in the first person, goes something like this:
I find you, I’m not sure how I know, but I know you are one who knows the steps to this dance, I can feel it. We start by a courtship wherein I treat you like a Lady, taking you out, showing you off, doing little kindnesses and generally making you feel special.
You have seen the likes of me before and you are still stinging from the last relationship (it ended badly) so you are a little apprehensive of me. But the feelings you get when you are near me are intoxicating and you simply can’t resist, after all I am most persistent (and even a little aggressive).
Before long, we are a couple. I may ask that you not see others and, oh by the way, would you please wear that little red dress I bought for you, you look so sexy in it. And why don’t you quit that job, honey, those women you work with are just feeding you a bunch of lies; I’ll take care of you. Why, I’m all you’ll ever need, little sweetie!
And you just slide right along, eyes only half open, awash in the feelings of being wanted and cared for and… feeling Whole. You have again mistaken Attention for Love and, though you know where this road leads, you really enjoy this section so much and you trick yourself into thinking it will be different this time. (“Momma and the girls are wrong about him, I just know it. I’ll MAKE it different this time. I know he can change. I can help him).
And before you know it, you look up and SMACK, didn’t I TELL you not to go over there; what do you think I am, a fool? I see the way men look at you and you go right along with it too don’t you; you know how much I love you, baby; don’t you do this to me; Oh baby I’m so sorry; I’ll never do that again; I don’t know what came over me; I just love you so much, please give me another chance.
And for a split second you see me for what I am, a mean, scared, insecure, beaten down little boy and you see that this relationship will never be any better and you need to leave right now and never look back. But the clarity only lasts for a second. And I can see my daddy in the reflection in the mirror and the words slipping out of my mouth are his words and my rage is his rage, his bitter gift from long ago. Just for a second I can step back from this ugly and timeless role and see it as plain as the blood on your shirt.
But even before your face and my hand stop their stinging, both of our hearts start listening to my lies and excuses and you want to believe me and so you do, little by little. And before you know it, you have slipped right back into the rut and you are again swept away by the promises and gestures. And for a while it is so good and you feel Whole once again. You feel Complete with me. Until the tension starts to build again and you have to start walking around as if on eggshells and avoiding certain topics, and dressing just so and Lord help you if another man looks your way. It’s best just not to go outside anymore, Buck’ll get mad.
The public defender looked just like that midget from the Wild Wild West TV series a few years ago, only taller. He waddled around, sweating and thinking out loud, stumbling over questions to which he did not know the answer. I kept thinking that all he had to do was to make her display her anger on the stand and the jury would blame her. They didn’t much like her anyway and were just looking for a reason to blame her. Then he stumbled onto the fact the she was pregnant. And we all did the math in our heads and figured out that she had been impregnated by Buck after the alleged stalking incident. And that was that. Case dismissed.
There are pictures of dead white guys on one wall of the courtroom. And on the other wall there are plaques commemorating the lives of other dead white guys. One was for James Hemphill, born July 3, 1813, admitted to the bar July 1836, and was a “learned lawyer, a just man, a patriotic citizen” until his death on January 12, 1902. After that he was just another dead white guy.
And I wondered how many times this drama had been played out within these walls. Surely people have been doing this dance for as long as men and women have been together. I wondered if Buck and Tallulah’s great-grandparents had done the same little dance in front of Judge Hemphill, the learned lawyer, the just man. I could almost hear the anguished voices of a hundred thousand victims, crying out their pain over the years, and the angry and pained voices of the accused, loudly proclaiming their innocence.
I left before the verdict came in, but I knew what it would be. I know how this story ends 95% of the time. A few years later, I saw Tallulah at the Wal-Mart with a cart full of kids and beer and packages of diapers. She was wearing sunglasses indoors to hide her bruised eyes. And she had a sheepish grin that said all I wanted to know and more. “What’re your baby’s names?” I had to ask. “The oldest is Shablabla,” she said and, indicating the infant in her arms “and this here is Buck, Jr.”
Dave Seward
June 2001
Disclaimer:
I made all these people up, they aren’t real. And therapy doesn’t go like this, I made it up to make me and the fictional client’s look great. And it takes hour after hour after hour of therapy to get to one of the aha moments captured here and I don’t write about the countless sessions that I spent being clueless and bewildered and not helpful at all. And besides, I made all this up anyway.
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