Vindication is a Bitch, Even When It is Unintentional

 The tragedy of it all is all around me.  In the words and message of William Shakespeare life is tragedy, unavoidable tragedy.  I have lived it but worked really hard to leave the bulk of it behind.  To get on with your life, to remain viable and productive, some tragedy is necessary.  (or so many say in the arts)  Perhaps it is the tragedy that gives you your soul.  Okay.  I have enough of that, and I have been doing the best I can most of my life to leave it behind, the disappointment and sadness.  The loss.  The bereavement.  Without visiting that dead, cold, not moving horse again, it revisits me from time to time.  I have to smell it again, taste it again, and try to learn something new from it.  This time I had a few enlightening thoughts.  Never have I shirked the responsibility that I may have been to blame for my consequences.  I took full responsibility eventually for the relationship break up that accompanied the loss of a job.  I was forced to do this to achieve closure on that horrible unhealed wound.  I did not understand much of it at the time, but I found myself without a suitable support system in a foreign city once that was supportive and nurturing.  So is the way of the world, up and down.  Success and failure.  It was deemed that I was to pay for my callous behavior, but in retrospect I am coming to realize it was not all my fault.  I took full responsibility, but the reality was I took a full frontal hit from the outside.    Easily it can be summed up with the song title, "My Old Lady Married a Clam Chop."  I have no animosity over the past, but I have pain.  I carried a large wound for a long time, until I figured out how to heal it.  Like those of us who have suffered, we know how to heal the wound.  We change ourselves into someone new, someone better and leave the past behind.  That is not to say that this past will not try to revisit us time and time again.  In my situation of losing a job and a relationship near the same time, I was not all to blame.  One little incident I took responsibility for was that at my Halloween bash in Columbia, Donna Crump seduced me.  Yes, Scott, your wife Donna came to this party with a sassy mouth, a bottle of bourbon (or perhaps it was mine, but she was happy to drink it) and the idea that my relationship with Lee McBride was flawed.  I don't know what was in her mind, but on that particular night celebrating Halloween in Columbia, SC it was not Scott.  Was I too blame that it had been a long summer, and Lee was in Charleston for all of it.  We didn't communicate much at all.  I didn't know she was finding another route for her life managing downtown dance clubs.  She was faithful to me for a while, because I went down to visit her and she was proud to show me off to her local customers.  Then she was proud of me, because I was a successful academic.  After finishing the masters degree, I had been offered a Guest Lectureship in jazz studies at USC.  All ready I had moved back to Fayettenam, but two weeks before the fall semester Dick Goodwin called me on the phone and offered me this meager position.  It didn't pay much, and there were no benefits at all.  He said they would try their best to get me private students and gigs.  Who would turn down a college level teaching position at my age?  It was fruitful that I took it, and it was a good year.  Lee lived with me most of that year.  It was not until the full-time tenured position replacing John Emche was given to Jon Serry that things went awry for me.  There was another summer in Charleston in for Lee, but this time I had no teaching money on which to live.  I began to struggle financially.  I found I could get by as a single person, but I no longer could support the lifestyle we had become accustomed to.  I asked her to help, and she could not.  Instead she was insulted and disappointed that we no longer had the same clout in the musical community.  I felt her become a burden rather than an asset to my life, because she stopped going to her classes at USC.  She slept on my couch most of the day.  The romance quickly disappeared, and without my knowledge another option entered the picture for her.  I did not know this was  happening, but I did know she was not really interested in me anymore.  I was not the same respected college-affiliated teaching musician.  Covertly without my knowledge she was moving in a different direction.  This would be the second time a partner of mine would not be strong enough to cut the tie.  For whatever reason you move in different directions, but honestly and respect are all that are needed to move on peacefully and without the tragedy.  Like my first true love, she could not come to break up with me.  I was lead on and ultimately painfully abused in retribution for her anger at losing the relationship.  She admitted she made it a priority to bring me down, and she did.  It was not all my fault.  Donna Crump poised herself at that juncture and proceeded to drop poison in an all ready infected wound.  Lee was at the party as was Scott, her husband, but they were elsewhere.  Donna clung to me in the kitchen, and we drank bourbon together.  I did not realize what was happening.  She and Scott were friends of mind, so I had no worries about infidelity.  I was not attracted to her or interested, because she was married.  Because Lee had begun to stray we ended up drunk together in the kitchen.  We were so toasted that we were leaning on each other and laughing.  When Lee came into the kitchen, needless to say all hell broke loose.  The perfect reason for anarchy.  I had no such idea, and in fact was struggling with the sentiment that Lee all ready had strayed.  She was not interested in me anymore, and she was making it clear.  More importantly she wanted to punish me for whatever.  This as I just wrote was the second time that has happened to me.  You spend time apart, and suddenly your privileges are no longer.  The long arm extends itself, and you become a puppy on a leash to be abused, not loved.  It becomes your duty to realize their problem and break up with them.  Not the other way around.  They are not strong enough to cut you loose, so you get strung along and abused.  Lee was good at this, and the scar it created was massive.  In a very short period of time she dropped out of USC and married a drummer from Charleston.  Just like that her college days were over, and a hipster, Cajun-seeming, Motown singing dude became her husband.  I was out of the picture.  The pain for me was not so much losing her, but watching her drop out of college and settle for this lifestyle.  She told me that during the gigs, they would cook red beans and rice on the dance floor.  This was appealing to her.  Unbeknownst to me, but what became very present was I was supposed to compete with this to keep her.  She wanted to be a groupie, and it didn't help that my band Quintessence had won the Hennessy Cognac jazz search.  She and John Glancy's girlfriend, "Juicy Lucy" as I called her accompanied us to New Orleans to play at the Storyville Jazz Club.  Largely the two of them were responsible for our win, two crazy blonds were showed their asses on a massive scale during our meager performance.  Needless to say Doc Severinsen was impressed by their performance, and we were declared the winners.  I was and am still appreciative of their efforts, but I had made no decision to become a jazz star.  I was a college teacher, and this was my interest.  Now I had to become a music star to keep her interest, and it was a drag.  I was pretty jilted, because the life we had lived for three years was created and perpetuated by me.  It was my study, work, and music performance which created our lifestyle, and she was livid to lose it.  It became my fault her fall from grace.  During that summer when I am sure she was involved with Clamchop, a young girl took a fancy to me at a Jackie Muckenfuss gig in Columbia.  I figured what the hell, so I took her out one time.  I don't know what her motives were, but when I took her for a motorcycle ride her hands were all over me.  Perhaps she could not control herself, but she made it clear that anything instigated by me was not appropriate.  Two seeming manipulative women at the same time.  This was a time in my life I was a devout Episcopalian.  I didn't have the tools to be a bad boy rock star.  Also I didn't have the self esteem having just been refused the job I came to covet as life itself.  I had been ousted from academia for a piano-playing percussionist with a few Hollywood composing connections.  Perhaps it was a political mistake that I made my opinion known about the mistake in hiring Jon Serry to replace John Emche.  I had been there for three years nurturing this position and knew what is was about.  It was clear to me that while Mr. Serry had serious music credentials in composition and jazz fusion, this skill set was not that appropriate to recruit and teach jazz to South Carolina natives.  I wrote a letter to William Moody and expressed my concerns.  Needless to say I probably would have refrained from this had I known what I know now.  Now I became the enemy not only of the McBride family but of the USC School of Music.  I was kicked out of the local nest in a big way, and I found my way to Columbus, Ohio were Dr. Emche had complete his D.M.A.  It became the beginning of a better chapter in my musical life, although it took me four years to pull out of the severe depression that ensued.  I never really thought about Donna Crump, and how I didn't instigate that scenario in the kitchen.  It bestowed itself upon me, and for what it is worth I enjoyed the companionship.  I had to plans to follow up and apologized to Scott if we had done anything inappropriate.  Lee exaggerated it into a tragic plot, and perhaps for her it was.  Rest assured Clamchop all ready was in the picture.  They remained married for four years, and after four years I again was blamed for its demise.  I had decided to move on, and the few trinkets I had kept from our relationship I sent to her in case she wanted to keep them.  A day later I received a phone call from Mr. Clamchop asking me my intentions.  I said I had none, apologized to him for the inconvenience, and moved on.  Years later Lee told me this caused the break up in her marriage, my sending her some cards and jewelry.  Vindication is a bitch.