13
Sometimes, there is nothing worse than the ugly and torturous experience of having to relive memories that have the taste of bitter grapes to them. Even something as painful and immortal as an old scar or a wound can be fixed given enough time and the miracles of modern medicine. But there is no cure for a memory that reminds you of spurned chances. No amount of healing salves or ointments or miracle cures is going to take away the feeling of emptiness that pervades every cell in your body when you go to sleep and the unresolved moments from the past start attacking your consciousness. Injuries like old memory wounds – they always remain fresh and ready to hurt when you least expect it because they remind you, in that little window of idle restlessness before sleep takes over, of a particular incident from years ago where you messed things up royally.
A while back, I was talking to a stranger at one of those nameless faceless parties up in Hollywood Hills that professional etiquette impels me to attend from time to time. This stranger, whose sex escapes me because I was well beyond normal intoxication levels while I was talking to them, had brought up the subject of regrets during the course of our interaction. And I was amazed anyone would willfully stoop to such shocking levels of honesty while unknown people surrounded them on all sides; regardless of how many they'd had to drink prior. It was inevitable, however, that eventually I was faced by a contingent of those same unknown faces peering towards me in search of my take on the topic. And I was so taken aback by their glossy countenance, that I reverted to my default trick of saying the first airy, vanity-laden, dismissive thing that often pops into my head – "No, I don't have any regrets." I said with a wave of my hand which I hoped would cover the air of panic that had suddenly gripped me, and it did. It brought about a round of leisurely nods, some knowing grins, and a collection of feminine giggles that signified I was in the clear. By the time I looked up, everyone had turned their attention to other things anyway; a clear indication that this particular game had lost its interest.
And that's all it was – a game. Yet all the way back home, as I sat in the back of my car watching the Los Angeles street lamps streak by my window in luminous lines, I kept wondering why I felt this unspecified lump swirling the depths of my mind as it tried to make its way to the surface.
You see, despite my bold proclamations of not holding any regrets, it is beyond a doubt to me now that there is something like it, or at least akin to it, associated with the memory of the night Peter told me the truth about his life as Spider-Man. Very few things hold as much sway over my thoughts these days than those months and years we spent huddled together in each other's company in the Compton. So naturally, that night he came bundling through my window, jarred and shaken to the core, sticks out like a culmination of various events that had conspired over time to bring us together. Almost like an onrushing tornado sweeping things up from the ground and sucking them towards its center to be intertwined in a final movement.
Then, to have said the things I said, to have acted the way I did, to have shunned all of that with - " … maybe I just don't want to be around you that much anymore…" feels in all its entirety, like a punch to the gut to everything that had led us there. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to him. It also lends even more evidence to the fact that for whatever reason, the girlish immaturity I had accused myself of during my early adolescent years, hadn't left me still. Just thinking back to that first time I met Peter out on his porch and that awful ear-grinding hash of a comment involving something about a jackpot serves as a harsh reminder. Once upon a time, I thought that was as low as I could get with my ill-thought-out undertakings, but clearly, I had proven myself totally and utterly wrong.
On that note, I suppose I should add that it isn't just regret that I hold for that night from Peter's confessional. It's also guilt.
Guilt has made that night even more of a painful memory than it felt like at the time.
Because who was I to act sullen and churlish about my feelings being hurt a little when Peter Parker was out there saving the world.
But enough about that. Back to the story at hand.
In the months following the night I learned Spiderman's identity, a lot of things changed. Not least of which was epitomized by my sudden estrangement from Peter. On the one hand, learning his secret afforded the both of us a greater level of intimacy than we'd ever shared before. But on the other, it drove a wedge between us that we both found hard to move past. Though, understandably so. Like I said earlier, the night of confession had longstanding effects which went far beyond just being a bad night. Some of them were personified very plainly in the level of wary caution implicit in both our behaviors whenever we happened to be around each other. And I remember thinking in that time how odd it was that after having made it past the stage of keeping secrets from each other we were moving into the next one with something still keeping us apart. In fact, in many ways, instead of feeling closer, sometimes it felt like we were both tiptoeing against an invisible line, living in anxiety that any moment we could trip over and fall catastrophically on our faces and into each other's firing range.
"Where were you?" I would ask him most days.
"Herman- Shocker broke out of the Raft"
"Oh really," I said in a tone that belied a false sense of normalcy, "How did it go?"
"Not great. Anything else?"
"No, just curious. Where should we go for dinner?"
This was just a smidgen of our new way of talking to each other. We were both desperate to be open and welcoming every topic at hand and yet, afraid of hurting each other in unfathomable ways like we had a tendency for in the past – he with his disappearing acts and me with my recurring petulance.
But, of course, anyone would tell you that any chance of reconciliation dies when you start living in fear of one another. And that's what I was discovering. Well that, and a newly formed habit of nail-biting, which was born from those periods of absence when he would be out on one of his rounds going punch-for-punch with some maniacal freak. By then I was old enough to start distinguishing between what was good for me and what wasn't, and that kind of pathological worrying wasn't one of them. It came with the territory, however, of living a life that was tied in the oddities of Peter Parker. And though I understood it at first, the passing of weeks and months dampened the concern I had for the tightrope act he often led, which involved skirting around the face of danger almost all the time. I mean there were incidents once or twice where he would return to the Compton with a truly nasty injury – I remember once where he spliced the inner part of his left calf – but those would fix themselves soon enough thanks to the mysterious workings of his enhanced biology. Nothing happened in the time I knew him to truly send him to the verges of death, which is a dark and ominous thing to say but that doesn't change the facts of the matter. He could take care of himself pretty well for the most part, which brings me back to the point I was trying to make in the first place - when the day finally came that I stopped worrying about him and the danger he often threw himself into, a part of me stopped caring as well.
Things changed even more after graduation when I moved out of Compton and into a new place near Soho. And while Peter found a way to visit me still, it did nothing more than simply remind me that while I was trying to figure out a path to follow, he'd found his a long time ago. That red and blue uniform in which he would come and visit me on the terrace amidst the grey smoke rising from the streets was the life he'd chosen. Spider-Man was, for all intents and purposes, his call-to-arms. It was what he'd devoted most of his life towards and when I compared it to mine I found a huge void that was waiting to be filled. In a sense, that was why I'd moved to a new place, to strike out on my own and to carve out a space only I could fill.
These were the thoughts bubbling in my head as I embarked on a string of auditions across New York City for the next year. They weren't for movie roles, not that I'd have the chance to land any of them, but for small theatrical productions that often paid enough to get by. It was a time dotted with helter-skelter bus rides from one part of Manhattan to another remote part of Brooklyn, midnight cab rides from Long Island back to home, and the crushing weariness I'd wake up to in the mornings after having tried my best to kick-start my acting career off of its so far inert launching phase.
Then, just as things were approaching something akin to an even keel, if I can use that phrase at all, a massive blow arrived that threw everything out of focus again.
Norman Osborn, Harry's father, was arrested one evening after having been ousted as the man operating behind the devilish moniker of the Green Goblin - the same man, who was responsible for throwing Gwen Stacy to her lurching death off of the George Washington Bridge, and a million other crimes to boot.
When the apprehension happened, and it happened swiftly indeed, Peter told me that he wasn't in the least bit surprised. He had known for years but had never managed to catch the "weaselly psychopath" – his words not mine – and bring him to justice.
As for Harry, his side of the story was very different and full of audacious mental U-turns now that the same man he had worshipped for as long as I could remember while going out with him, had been turned over to the law and to the hands of the press and media to be vilified as a monster in the eyes of the people. Not that I wasn't entirely sympathetic to his cause because the revelation of his father's true nature and identity was in many ways not too dissimilar to me finding out about Peter's true identity. We had both found ourselves through strange and inexplicable circumstances lurking in the vicinity of men who carried themselves around as false people under the guise of a duplicitous mask. And it was in the embrace of this idea that we found a strange solace in each other's arms. Despite, all our ups and downs over the years, it was finally our turn to act as the solid, unshakeable pillars that we were meant to be for each other. Just to keep everything from crashing down and burying us in a rubble of shifting poisonous emotions.
It was a fiery sort of engagement with which we found ourselves wrapped in each other's bodies in my new Soho apartment in the weeks following Norman's arrest. The unabashed grinding of our physical souls over my rickety bed was reminiscent of the time we had met each other for the first time back in Midtown, which by the way, was so long ago. "So long ago," I sighed, blowing cigarette smoke off of my lips as I turned to face Harry's sleeping naked body on the other side of the bed. At long last, we had found that same intensity that had brought us together so many years ago, albeit a little too late now for it to matter anyway.
Because I knew even then that none of this would last for very long.
In a month's time, the Oscorp board of directors arrived at a unanimous decision to overthrow the hegemony of the Osborn family members from their positions within the company. This meant that Harry was suddenly left without a job, without an inheritance, and without a father, and carrying a publicly tarnished name in the domains of the entire length and breadth of the United States. Though, the one thing he did have and hadn't been stripped off of just yet, was the copious, never-ending, pit-like depths of his wealth. And it was with that in hand, he decided to leave the country. As he put it, there was nothing left for him to preserve in the States anymore, nothing more to be lost; a new beginning was the only logical path left. He did try to entice me during this process to accompany him to wherever the heck it was that he was going – "Europe," he said, "I'm going to Europe". But I merely answered in the negative despite his repeated pleas.
The requests continued all the way down to the airport on the day of his departure, which had been arranged with swift haste by Norman's lawyers. Apparently, he wanted his son carted away to distant lands as soon as possible, long before his own trial came to fruition. An odd thing to arrange for a man who seemed as heartless and antagonistic as Norman Osborn. But then again, maybe there was a flicker of warmth in that man for Harry after all. The same couldn't be said for me though. Despite the rekindling of our relationship over the last few days, I remained completely neutral and unresponsive to his invitations of tagging along to whichever number of mansions his father owned outside the continent. In fact, his queries got so tedious and nauseating and cumbersome, that I almost ended up telling him off as a result.
"I don't want to, Harry! Just go! Go before your flight leaves!" – I said as a tear ran down my trembling cheek. "You really mean it?" he asked, his voice barely managing to keep from wavering, and when I nodded, he turned and disappeared behind the automated glass doors of the airport terminal, never turning back once. And I just stood under the canopy of the vast metallic structure for an hour afterward feeling more and more terrible as the seconds passed away.
It was in that time I spent outside the airport terminal, roaming its vast endless parking lots and other meandering paths, the last thing Peter had told me during the night of his confession came back to me – "Why did you keep going along with the false charade, MJ? Tell me, why. Why pretend that it was all fine?" At that time, I'd dismissed it as nothing more than a question framed in the heat of the moment. There was no meaning attached to it as far as I was concerned. But now I knew there was. Somewhere, in that very line of questioning, Peter had managed to address the biggest flaw in my character, as I was only beginning to recognize for myself. It had always been there and I'd just failed to notice it. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time left to ponder long and hard about it, because after everything that had happened with him and Harry and my own struggles professionally, I was drawing up a new resolution of far greater importance.
One that had been playing on my mind for a while - just as the background static noise of a TV might – and one that would take me far away from this place and leave me no time to get bogged down in the details of my increasing aimlessness in relation to the future. It wasn't really a statement or a proclamation, but more of a realization. that maybe, just maybe, the time had finally come for me to start afresh. To wipe the slate clean, as they often say, and begin anew. And the only way I could do that was by leaving the fading familiarity of New York City behind.
Of course what I didn't know then was that in some ways, I already had.