Most of us make what I like to call livable mistakes. We take a job we shouldn’t. Major in a futureless discipline at undergrad. Make a movie (private or professional) we hope no one sees. In the course of the average life, these miscalculations amount to minor hiccups.
Then there are the big mistakes. The ones you can’t walk back, or paper over with a glossy resume or delete and burn. The bad marriages, rotten business deals, fights you should have walked away from but now can’t. These are the mistakes that rupture the flow of self identity from the core of a person to the frontal cortex. Some missteps force you to rethink yourself. Mine was the Marine Corps.
Don’t thank me for my service. Please. It was after 9/11, I was “in” for less than a year, went UA (“AWOL” to most people) and got a General Discharge. Aside from sounding like the payload of mysterious sores found after a reckless weekend in some morally loose metropolis, a GD is basically the military’s way of saying, “we didn’t want you, you didn’t like us, let’s go our separate ways.”
Easily the most civilized breakup of my life. Of course no relationship leaves one unscathed.
My friend Squeak (who, I swear, has a real adult woman’s name and is an attorney but to me, forever and always will be 17 years old, loud, shinning and one of the great platonic loves of my life) said at the time I was on my way to basic training, “we won’t get back the same Alex we give them.”
She was right of course. I became a different person on many levels and I struggled for years after my dalliance with the country’s first to fight. Years of unemployment, anger, confusion, moving around, micro-relationships with women who (let’s say) less than fit my needs. I was lost, plain and simple.
But it wasn’t the USMC that created this storm in my life. As they say on the island, “character is who you are when no one is looking.” My time there held up a mirror to the cracks in myself that I wanted to ignore.
They saw me, shrugged and let me go. I saw me and hated it.
Annie saw me before she ever laid eyes on me. This was long before the enlistment. She read my writing and singled me out before she knew who I was. Honest and true. We had never once met until the day she approached me as I sat on the steps of my dorm and announced that I was “Alex Ivey and we are going to be friends.”
Annie never called me by my first name. It was never, “Alex, can you pass the hot sauce?” Or “do you want to take a ride to Vinyl Solution, Alex?”
To Ann Marie Hololob I was perpetually Alex Ivey. Never to be diminished and always spoken with the cadence of a byline. “Alex Ivey, get in that car, we’re going to lunch.”
My wonderful Annie. If I open a box with no bottom and pour into it all that my mind can comprehend, it would not find the depth of my affection for her.
And what a friendship. What a gift to give a scared, angry kid who felt the whole world looking away from him. Never once did she doubt that I was destined to be what I wanted to be. If I faltered and couldn’t see a future in my first love of the written word, she would redirect me with a certainty that was at times baffling. She read everything I published and always had something insightful and kind to say about it.
She was like a coach who could inspire a mediocre athlete to greatness. It was the first time in my young life that a person who had no earthly reason whatsoever to care about me believed in me totally.
And in turn I believed in her. If Annie told me she wanted to open a dental practiced in Kuala Lumpur I had no doubt it would happen within a year. If she wanted me to carry her to Poughkeepsie I’d lace up my boots and get to hauling. She had the most amazing poker face and a gift of gab that belonged in novels.
If she wanted to drive to the fucking moon, I was in. I could never write enough about her. I could never explain our friendship (everyone assumed we were romantic — in all these years there wasn’t even a kiss!) and it baffled some people. But it was only confusing if you looked no deeper than the demographics of place, race and cash. Annie and I were artists. In some ways moreso than the professional “creative” people I meet these days. She was immensely gifted in her crafts.
But Annie’s true gift — her unrivaled brilliance — was as a friend, a mother and a wife. If she was your friend, no matter how far away she was, you could feel her faith in you. It was elemental, like the stratosphere, turning and flowing to any inch of the planet you might find yourself on.
It is still out there in the air, in the scent of living things, the smell of fresh ink on skin. The residual oils of her fingertips on the fabrics and letters she created. Those of us in possession of these artifacts carry precious cargo.
All I can do now is hold up her example to my daughter, though it will never be enough. I have the greatest partner in my wife that a person could want and yet the evolution of my baby girl’s womanhood will still lack for something without Annie.
How cruel is time. We cannot negotiate, placate or deceive it. And it moves stubbornly away from the people we love.
She was funny! I must have snorted a galloon of liquid sitting around and talking shit with her. Annie was equal parts artist, pin up, pervert, old Jewish lady, Edwardian socialite, trucker and art school weirdo.
Before the end, she came to LA and slept on my air mattress. She had a gallery show up in the art district. I’d moved to Los Angeles after a divorce and was as far gone as I’d ever been. (We’re talking way-down-lucky-to-be-alive-today gone.)
But Annie was characteristically wry, upbeat and from what I could see doing better than I could have hoped. In secret I worried about her sometimes. She could be so damn reckless and lacked what I considered to be a responsible amount of fear.
She had no time for any of that. Back into my life, at the right time, she came roaring. All tattoos and small talk and making with the funny. I was so proud of her but I couldn’t show it. I felt like I was slipping away and here she was, grabbing my wrists again, refusing to let me go. I wanted to squeeze her too hard. I wanted to grab her, jump through a portal and go to Las Brisas for lunch. Maybe we could all move to California and live on the beach. I could write and she could open a bookstore. Marissa could open a law practice, Athena and her family could start a successful movie studio. Sam could teach the local surfers how to read!
But no such magic occurred no matter how hard I held her. We were still in our 40s, responsible and decidedly not back in Westchester, young, cocky and cared for.
Her show was a success. We said our goodbyes. I got the last hug I will ever get from her. And back to Virginia she went, where I could see even from LA, she had created a community through the power of her example. She was special like that.
In her fashion, she sent me a letter afterward. In that letter she thanked me, as if she hadn’t saved me in those early years of adulthood. She thanked me for teaching her to never give up, to keep going with grace and dignity. Again she told me how much she believed in me as a writer, as a man and as a friend. And again she thanked me.
See what I mean about funny?