Chapter Twenty – Nine
“That Woman Deserves Her Revenge.”
“And we deserve to die.” ––Sidewinder Budd as portrayed by Michael Madsen in Tarantino’s 2003 Kill Bill II
A smidgen of digression near the end of that last, wee chapter perhaps –– aleap of around a decade or so,
a leap of not just one extra day as in some Februarys. It did end though. That chapter –– The Opera.
It did but not without one last Andrew Lloyd Weber – like pouf. Actually it felt more like a sound fillip to the skull’s temple–– as if it had emanated from the small but malevolent mitts of little bullies on an elementary school’s playground. There was a 13 September 1994 filing–– upwards one more level –– from that Iowa Court of Appeals fiasco wherefromJudge Pansy Shawshank and her lone cohort in dishing out Truth and Justice, brand newly appointed Judge Barry L. Crowrook, as The Majority who the two of them actually were in their having just decided that I HAD WON MY APPEAL! and should have Herry Edinsmaier’s taking stopped, were, on ‘my case’, never to be heard from again! Sent up to the State of Iowa Supreme Court on that date now only two weeks shy of Mirzah Truemaier’s 15th birthday went a document which initially stumbled along as almost all of the gazillions of documents before it had, “COMES NOW … ”
“COMES NOW the Appellant – Respondent, Dr. Legion True, pursuant to the Iowa Rules of Appellate Procedure nos. 16a and 402 and in support of her APPLICATION FOR FURTHER REVIEW BY THE IOWA SUPREME COURT, argues as follows:
1. that in the allotted 20 days in which to request such Application for Further Review, Appellant
Dr. True wanted to hire an attorney to represent her in this Argument before the Iowa Supreme Court against the 25 August 1994 Court of Appeals Majority Opinion; but at the requested retainer price of $8,000.00 by the Mot Yelir Law Firm of Cedar Rapids, she not only has no such money, but she knows
of no one of her (ordinary) friends or working class parents who would have such money for themselves
in such a situation, let alone, be able to loan her such money. Therefore, extremely reluctantly but necessarily, Dr. True appears in this Application and Brief pro se –– again –– realizing that IF she had had the money, then that Firm, which rarely, if ever, loses, would have taken on her struggle. There has to be hope in that message.”
It, the Application to the Supreme and final appellate Court of Iowa, continued through 13 more major points and a total of 17 pages with The(TRUE MAJORITY’s, that is, Shawshank’s and Crowrook’s)Dissent in its six pages appended, word – for – word, as well. At the time of this writing, I had forgotten it all –– until once more rereading that Brief all again! It was fucking damned good in my estimation ––
even now! Pro frickin’ se though this last fling, too, had had to be flung by me to ‘the Courts’full up of all of daMen! The one sentence out of its entirety that sticks out the most to me now, however? Its last one, the underscored sentence of Point #1 in the above paragraph, “There has to be hope in that message.”
Uh – uh. Now? Now, I am changed. “A changed individual,” Dr Bassenthwaite in her Sixth Floor SpaChezResort’s diagnostic analysis had charted regardingso sleep – deprived, then fully rested Legion –– after my ~72 hours’ worth of induced and constant slumber. After those three necessary nights and days of uninterrupted somnolence. And I say, “Uh – uh! No mother – fucking way is there any such thing! Hope? HOPE is a woman – killer. The deadliest ever.
File – stamped the 04th day of November 1994, The Opera was all over. Indeed. All over. For good and forever done with. Fin. Arriving in that Havencourt mailbox inside the truly skinniest envelope harboring
but one single page, if even a whole sheet at that, I pretty much knew it, too, that there was to be … no more.
Acceptance? Well, I didn’t even think on whether or not I had to accept that there was to be no more. No more … hope. Just the knowing of nomore was what was fairly deeply settling within.
Again, only the one sentence. The ‘order’ as the lone page was actually and arrogantly entitled might as well have been one mere upswept stroke of then – Chief Justice Arthur MacGyver’s pen marking a little check – off box beside a standard set of responses on some fucking template form! “After consideration
by this court en banc, further review of the above – captioned case is hereby denied.” With there to be absolutely no applause, no bows and most certainly no script or score encores … then, the Opera’s … Final Curtain … descended.
NO matter the weally, weally wee thingy –– woman – wise, that is –– that 23 of the 25 guardians of the United States Constitutionat Pillar – Kingy Herod Edinsmaier’s dictum, at daMan’s patriarchal whininess, had just wholly and soooo, so easily and androcentrically mother – fucked over one (more) wild and … crazy whore. A Majority of these justices had just ruled in the mama’s favor? Two out of the three who had actually ‘heard’ and ‘sort of’ slightly … knew… ‘my case’? Why –– Hell …daJudge Chieftain Donnellson of Iowa’s lower appellate court, (“They ask themselves!” American Gigolo had snidely chortled in response to how it is these pillared men seem to know that they are … “above the law”)
just disguised it all over in to … A Dissention –– bada bing, bada bang, bada boom! Noooo problem! –– Done. Fuck her. NO matter that.
The woman had simply pissed off all but one of DaMen, ‘holy’ones and so– otherwise ones, all of ‘em… just ooooone too, too many times. NO matter that. She? That Bitch? The Bitchgets it. She gets …gutted. Fin.
* * * *
Jesse had already scored a touchdown in junior varsity football. And, unfortunately … had already been penalized after its doing, too! It seems he jumped up and down too much from the glee of it all –– or some such stupid rule violation –– so that the referees put the one – point kick maneuver back another 15 yards more! The homemade videotape from another mother madly cheering alongside me from the Friday evening bleachers whose teammate child of Jesse’s I didn’t even know was such a welcome gift; I have fast – forwarded that tape to his particular play over and over and over just to see Jesse’s reaction after he, with such muscular pins zipping, zoomed into the end zone. His very first time ever! Crossing the bar, crossing the line –– that’s what it’s all about –– after all!
And I, his mama? I actually watched my child. I actually saw all of Jesse’s efforts in this endeavor of his. In a game which I rather loathe otherwise, I was from those Friday – night bleachers engaged with all of its players. I was not reading a paperback or the newspaper with my eyeballs averted or else their raptly fixated upon some other man’s globes feigning hooking – up – later glances as so, so many times, from the Truemaier Boys’ event sidelinesof years before, we had all witnessed Sperm – Donor Edinsmaier’s repeated behaviors. I for my kiddo at such activities? I was there.
Jesse was well – established, too, with Ms. Lee; every Wednesday afternoon for half an hour that almost always ran overtime, she reiterated for Jesse those fingering scales first learned back in Suzuki long, long ago. But in such a fun way that of his own accord entirely, he diligently practiced not only willingly but enthusiastically: Jesse was not always totally prepared for every week’s piano lesson, but he so could have fooled me!
Rex I had had to bury. And had had to tell Jesse this. Jesse’s Florida king she – snake, and so aptly named in Latin if but a wee bit off gender – wise, had passed just a few months before Jesse had arrived back on Havencourt, never awakening from another winter at Dr. Legion True’s 37 – degree Fahrenheit indoor temperatures. But grayest Zephyr –– the two of us, Jesse and I, reverently remembered to alwaysFrenchily pronounce the tabby’s name only as ‘Zay – fear’–– seemed to be, now in his 12th or 13th year, still going strong. No other pets had we. All of the zebra finches of Zane’s, too, long gone, that last mothering one’s corpse, from when Lady, as had Rex, had frozen to death on the bottom of her rickety yellow cage, still lay in a plastic sandwich bag way in the back of the refrigerator’s lower freezer shelf.
With Jesse’s sophomore high school year came the option for such Iowa students to begin, if afforded and if with a parent’s signed waiver of accountability, driver’s training classes, a semester’s worth. Affordable this specialty was for Jesse only because I ignored almost all of my bills and our condominium’s needs in order to necessarily put down, up front as demanded by school administrators, the course’s full fee of $285.00 therefor! It is a wonderment to me how single mothers of multiple teenagers, fulltime working ones, for that matter, and those drawing down sort of living – wage paychecks even, manage such extra costs for kiddos’ learning desires. ‘Cause Jesse so utterly wanted to be learning to drive and I, as eagerly, so did not want, for myself, to ever have to deny him this deal!
A loveliestand unexpected side effect appeared for us both one day at my break time at work. The Forestry Department’s Professor Joseph in conversation then centering upon his own daughter’s earlier experiences with drivers’ ed in high school simply up and offered to take Jesse, inside the Professor’s own stick – shift vehicle! mind you, on over to the gargantuan and often deserted Hilton Coliseum parking lot and “jump around”the concrete of it all, as Dr. Joseph shrugged, for as many times as the lessons take –– and until such moment as Jesse learns to drive a car powered by a manual transmission! “If you want this for him, Legion? Ya’ know –– if he has your permission first, Mama.” I was speechless. And thrilled. And now? Now years later? Jesse knows! Because of … the generosityto me of one Dr. Joseph. Jesse knows of that … as well.
* * * *
Rosalind Franklin came to me one day at work and point – blank flat – out told me, for my own benefit, that it was her supervisory thinking thatI should move on to a higher level of university secretary. There had taken place serious discussion amongst the bigger wigs with regard to strategic planning for the full Forestry Department’s next five to ten years; and within those plans, there was not to be, she stated, the inclusion of any change in classification for my particular spot, Secretary I.
Because of the money –– because of the increase in salary involved, I concurred and so, with a shitload of sadness at saying goodbye to such trustworthy and loyal people, accepted the earliest Secretary II opening offered to me –– winding up as graduate advising secretary in charge, administratively, of coordinating all of the pieces and all of the parts connected to the incoming Graduate College admissions’ applications specifically to the Department of Economics at Iowa State University. Money was so not my thing; thinking about money, bottom line or top line or even in between, I managed only to pay my own bills and think not one more iota’s worth about saving it or investing it or maneuvering it or, gaaawd knows, spending it! But that is the topic of all lines of a department of economics at any university! AmTaham had certainly known this; as a matter of fact, this specific department? This one was, indeed, his! His old alma mater major and department as both an undergrad and as an agricultural business master’s student! And totally why I had no compunction at all about taking the position beginning as I did right after that gaunt and bony envelope with its one Iowa Supreme Court ruling – sentence had arrived in my mailbox.
Wonderful people the ISU Department of Economics presented; I must say that I was surprised. They did, indeed, do an awful lot of thinking and doing and coming and going all surrounding and about money; but they actually also had some substance and depth, many of them did anyhow, besides,and in addition to, the classisttechnicality that there implicitly seems to be in handling money and its matters –– those which so certainly do gird their little world. I was to learn, in no short order, that their sphere, however, was not so little after all.
I began work there in early November then and took not one lunch hour’s leave until my supervisor found out about that and ordered me to do so! By then, since we two were actually officed on separate floors of a six – story structure with over 30 administrative personnel on all levels, it was mid – February! The pieces and the parts of graduate applications? The incoming US mail to that specific department –– daily –– was entirely overwhelming particularly right at those specific months of the year! Everyone and their cousin –– and especially their Chinese cousins –– were applying in droves for the next autumn’s admitting class of graduate students, that is for beginning class work in August 1995! It didn’t help me either, under the sacks and stacks of mail received every day, that that singular department out of all of the academic economics departments worldwide, happens to be one of the top – rated ones –– both in straight economics and in agricultural economics, especially in ag econ–– ever. And always! This is agrarian Iowa after all!
No wonder –– as he so had –– AmTaham True loved it, I am thinking. Anyone who is anyone and who wants a pillared graduate degree, in money, in the study and in the art of money’s matters, most definitely could want it labeled as granted her or him from IowaStateUniversity’s Department of Economics.
What I did as work, essentially, was to collate folks’ admission files. I opened mail, sometimes upwards of four hours’ labor spent in this one maneuver alone –– slicing envelopes and assembling and putting together their contents with the appropriate, hopeful student’s file. Or starting another brand – new one. Any idea how many Wangs and Zhangs and Chous and Zhous and Smiths –– all wanting a thorough education in the use and enjoyment of dollars or other dinero –– have the same first and middle names? How exacting is the receiving and the correctly compiling together all of the required parts of one person’s admission file, especially the pieces that were the precise number of different standardized test score results and letters of recommendation necessary? This careful compilation is not as menial nor as easy as some hoity – toities,
as some too good, too high and too mighty for such day labors’ snots––such as a certain King and his,
O say, elitist Sheriff of Nottingham, er, … his patrolling Sheriff of Grubtrop–– may presume it to be!
But I had Grace and I had László and I so had Jesse to help me get through that particular winter. There was one glitch to it, however, –– in addition to the no – heat scenario again. Yes, again–– even with Jesse now living with me on Havencourt. Jesse rather likened in his mind that living style, that is to say a mother and her son managing indoors without heat, to be as somehow a major kick in his 16 – year – old, progressive sense. A sort of suffering – for – the – cause in that we, his ma and he, were quite the energy – saving, environmentally conscious, socialist Iowans! Or even from the standpoint of the reality that the two of us were ‘just roughin’ it’ –– a type of backwoodsy, pioneer life such as 19th Century teenagers must have experienced –– must have literally survived ––before they and their mothers trudged out of the Sierra Madres on the westerly side of those snow – socked and – blocked mountain passes come springtime1847, … finally!
I suppose that he must have, once or twice, –– although I do not remember Jesse ever performing the actual act of telephoning and talking to Dr. Edinsmaier nor to his two brothers. Zane and Mirzah, of course, didnot call for social conversing or for any other reason for that matter. Zane had just entered his senior year in Grubtrop’s high school, and Mirzah accomplished that other of the two most major milestones of high school –– entering his freshman year! And still I, as mother to both, knew of them and of their comings and goings and thinkings and doings in West Virginia–– exactly squat. I do not remember if Slacker Herry actually ever did phone up Jesse even one time either. If Grubtrop’s so – revered Pillar – Daddee Edinsmaier had, indeed, done so? I would have, I am thinking, remembered that work of his!
I left the condominium at 6:30 a.m. every weekday morning that autumn –– walking over an hour and
a quarter into the University –– for exercise and for discipline. Because of those same two matters, especially the workout one, Jesse tossed his bicycle into the back of Ol’ Black’s wagon space, then drove himself, because his learner’s permit now entitled him to do so, into my departmental parking lot with plenty of time left for him to extract his bike and pedal on to the high school from there, a distance of yet another two to three miles actually! He would have wheels by which to get home at the end of his school day,and