Adrienne: a Past/Present Tribute (Pt I)

M rode down, the lone passenger on the shuttle from Taos to Albuquerque, catching the next morning flight to Dallas/Fort Worth. Mike, the driver, was friendly and filled M's mind with casual chatter, and since they had time to kill, even took a side trip on a road M hadn't been on. M liked the guy. Cabbies, shuttle drivers, all drivers are there for the diversity of scene, pavement, and people, and yes, kinda. Well, not in an office... the last cowboy jobs without a cow. I don't know about UBER drivers because they know, via an UBER app, who is sliding into the back seat of the car, but they are drivers and I suppose it's the same for them. This is the year 2021 and M was seventy-five. never believing he'd live this long or have this life he had. He owed the life he had to a woman in Southern France. Paris then Biarritz, that's where he'd go after the Dallas connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle airport, Paris. Adrienne had cancer and was being treated for it.

M was on his way to be with Adrienne who needed a friend. It had been twenty-five years since his mad affair with her. That affair ended in an enduring friendship. He'd been in touch with her on-and-off over the years, even while in the most stable relationship of his life with Briana after her. He could have never hoped for a better one in the nine years before she too was taken from him suddenly by a soul devastating loss from a sudden heart failure. Briana was a blessing as the result of eight years in recovery from alcohol and drug addiction and he almost felt the bottom falling out because of the loss.

During those eight years from Adrienne to Briana, M was driven to create a better life and to earnestly study and grow. He'd never forget that the life he'd created for himself had been inspired by the way Adrienne had touched him at a time when he'd given up on any hope for being able to love anyone or himself. He'd come to realize that his whole life had been a self-centered spiral careening into a pit. Quite the opposite of a Hollywood happy ending, it was her rejection during those chaotic months that ended in September of 1998. This had begun the motions of a new beginning. He was 50 years old when he met Adrienne... and I mean old... and his flame came as close as it would ever get to being snuffed.

See, he had all the reason in the world to think that his suffering was at the center of the universe and that he was the victim of fate. When the pour fucker fell in love with Adrienne, and I do mean it was a fall.... Funny term that, Fall. Though it was 99% obsession and only 1% love he looked into the mirror behind the bar at Pal's and saw a haggard and snaggle-toothed with receding gums alcoholic. Thinking about it now, it is no small wonder she wanted to keep him from her bed but once or twice. He'd lost his moxie and had descended into the morass of daily drinking and a bag of bud always. Yet, Adrienne, a beautiful well-to-do woman at forty going through a divorce had also succumbed to a couple pints of vodka a day. But she, living in a house on the hill had taken to him and had cared enough for and about M, a drunk living in a soon to be condemned hovel down on lower Anacapa in Santa Barbara. She had done that, not as a favor but in a common kinship of suffering as no one had in several years. It was enough for him to care about her too and they'd tried to sober-up together a few times. He could not do that before her, care for anyone, not anyone much since the divorce from Celeste. The short-term relationships he had before her were in the bar, or coke filled obsession on the night shift in the cab, and he thought it was living-the-life as best he deserved. His relationships from the bar lasted no more than a week or a month. He was with the lowlifes he had become. His heart had ossified into granite with mistrust. He had given up on the beginnings of a career in art that he'd worked for since he was a kid until his divorce. 

Up until he met her on her downward spiral, he knew he'd been cursed, if not by his past but by whatever gods there were. Grandiose to the extreme he thought of himself as a Job or a modern day Ulysses trying to make his way back to Ithica, wherever that was, and had only a shadow of hope that he'd ever get there having no plan of action other than to sit on his bar stool thinking someday he would land on the beach.

The bar owner's wife once told him, "Max, I see something in you that I don't understand... that you seem to have a gift, but you always turn any blessing into shit."

He felt that way about himself too... perceptive bar owners and/or their spouses have been around enough drunks to see people as either fallen angels or devils without a cause. But that was enough for this true borderline narcissist, as most alcoholics/addicts become, to believe he was important enough for the gods to curse.

Years went by after his dreams for Adrienne's love were crushed. He became grateful she had dumped him and worked hard at getting and staying sober. At first it was with the obsession intact, the hope that he could somehow win Adrienne's affection. The obsession dropped to 98-90-80-70 and on down to 10%. Had some on and off spotty relationships that stayed in the friend zone for the most part and eight-years later, it was boy meets girl on the AA campus. he met Briana. But this isn't about Briana. She asked several times why he doesn't write about her. His answer was, "When you dump me, I'll write about you."

She never dumped him, and by the way, Briana is a fictional name too. It's all fiction. Remember what I said, I am a liar. Briana passed away after nine years and M never had a chance to write about her while she was alive.

That's a lot of catching up to where M's flight to France began, but let me just say, the process of letting go of his obsession for Adrienne before she left to go back to her home in Southern France... he could admit that obsession about himself. He'd found an inner honesty that allowed him to love her with no strings attached just as he had been able to grow in his relationship with Briana. Briana could be another book-in-itself, but I am abbreviating that one to get on with the reason or reasons M was on the flight to the other side of the world.