Well, here I am again. Back in Turners Falls. Before I begin, I have a dateline update. In the first installment of this particular story, I said that my relationship with Miss Headcase probably ended in 1988. I’m now changing that to 1989 because a very specific weather event happened while I was still with Miss Headcase. You’ll see further on.

One night not long after Miss Headcase returned to Turners Falls, I received a phone call from her. She said that the car was not riding right and she wanted to trade it in…for a little sporty Honda CRX. I actually don’t think they even make this baby anymore. It somewhat resembled the 280Z. I was suspicious of this because the Sentra was in great shape. According to Miss Headcase, all we had to do was trade in the Sentra and give the guy an extra thousand. I told her I’d have to come out and make the deal myself. There was no way I was sending her more money. As it was, I was paying the rent and giving her plenty of spending money every week. She wasn’t working. Besides, I now believed that something was rotten in Turners Falls…and it wasn’t the car.

Nevertheless, I did my duty. The next day, I had too many meetings to attend to go out. I took the following day off and drove out to Barbara’s to pick her up. We went to the car dealership together and I took a look at what she wanted to buy. I immediately had the feeling that she was sleeping around with someone, and this new car was a manifestation of that. Honestly, I had no idea if it was male or female. With her new-found homophobia, it could very well have been a guy. To tell the truth, it was something I didn’t really want to deal with just then.

I was growing weary from this whole scene and wanted the path of least resistance. I gave the guy the thousand bucks and she got her car, but she got it with a warning. I told her that I knew the Sentra was in great shape when I bought it because I had a car mechanic look it over completely. She was buying a car that nobody had checked out and she was taking the word of a small-town car salesman. If it had problems after the fact, she could either borrow the money from her mother (who wasn’t about to give her jack), or get a job and get it fixed herself. I told her that if we still wanted to take the trip to Hilton Head, I needed to put some money aside.

She was busy making up the work she had missed while sick and was almost done with that. She also managed to pick up a job from our landlord up in Charlemont, Massachusetts — not far from Turner’s Falls. She was, however, concerned about completing her portfolio in time for graduation. She had all the photos chosen, she just didn’t have the time to mount and frame them for presentation. I told her not to worry about that part; just send me the negatives and I’d take care of it. I used my advertising agency to get it done, and the final tab was about $2,000. What mattered was that it got done on time and it looked great.

Miss Headcase graduates

The situation remained the same right up until graduation. I didn’t really understand why Miss Headcase wasn’t coming home on the weekends now that her portfolio had been completed and turned in. When I asked her, she said she had some stuff to finish up in lovely, charming and picturesque TF — including photographing a couple of families. Honestly, I knew the real answer to that question but I wasn’t really able to deal with it yet.

Miss Headcase’s mom flew to Boston (from California) for her graduation. I had become very friendly with her over the last three years of our relationship. We had a lot of laughs together.  I picked her up at Logan and she came to stay with me in Melrose. Two days later, we headed up to Turners Falls for Miss Headcase’s graduation. I had planned a huge graduation party for her at a friend’s house in Marblehead that would take place the day after graduation. We lived in a really nice condo at the time, but there was no yard. It was summer and I wanted to be able to cook out. My friend Linda’s place was perfect.

I anticipated that Miss Headcase would be packed and ready to come back to Melrose with her mother and I, but I was definitely wrong about that. Instead, she told me she would meet us at Linda’s the next day for her party. I was really pissed off at this, but I didn’t let that show. I didn’t want her mother’s visit to be ruined by an argument at this point. I let it go and told her what time to be there.

Miss Headcase’s mom and I sat together for a couple of hours and watched a movie. Then, she went to bed. Around midnight,  I got a call from Sam and Dave. They had just gotten back from Sam’s cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire and wanted to know how the graduation had gone. I told Dave that the ceremony was great and the weather was beautiful up there. Then he asked, “Is she home now?” I told him that Miss Headcase would be staying in TF overnight, but that she was going to go directly to her party at Linda’s tomorrow. I’ll never forget what he said next, “You have got to be fucking kidding me. Come up here right now. We have to talk to you.”

When I walked in the door, they immediately handed me a vodka on the rocks and told me to sit down. Apparently, when Miss Headcase went out to do the photo shoot in Charlemont, she confessed to the two of them that she was sleeping with Barbara and had been for quite some time. Dave told me that they didn’t immediately come back here and tell me — even though they wanted to — because she promised she was ending it and would be coming home.

You know, we had been having our problems, but I was really heartbroken. Maybe I didn’t show it as much as people thought I would, but I had my suspicions about her and Barbara for a long time. I guess the truth was that I just didn’t want to know for the longest time. Now that it had been confirmed, I actually felt relieved. Sam and Dave were really pissed off at her. To begin with, I had been living in Melrose well before I had met Miss Headcase, so these guys were my friends first. They were really upset that she hadn’t done what she said she was going to do.

By the time I made it downstairs at two in the morning, my depression had turned to full-blown anger. I wanted to get on the phone and confront her right at that moment, but I thought better of it with the party coming up tomorrow and her mother here. I let it slide and went to bed. I did not sleep very well.

I called her the next morning and I could not hold back. I told her that I knew what was going on. I told her she was to show up at the party — without Barbara in tow. I made it clear that she had no option. There were about fifty people invited and I had no intention of uninviting them. I also told her that her mother had flown out from California and she needed to do the right fucking thing. She promised she’d be there. On time.

The Mad Hatters party

I’ll hand it to her, Miss Headcase showed up on time and without Barbara. Lots of people were there, many from Millipore (where I worked), some of my friends, my family, and her mom. We were all dressed in shorts and/or jeans, T-shirts, sandals and sneakers. She walked in with nylons and a suit on, and I knew her transformation into a looney toon was complete. No question about it. I remember her mother’s face. She couldn’t believe it. She said to her, “Yeah, you look like a million bucks, but who the hell are you?”

I had been with Miss Headcase for more than eight years by then, and I knew this was about as far removed as you could get from who she really was. It was absurd. She was also acting quite snobby, and that really bugged me. By the time she arrived, I had already had a few drinks. I’m sure I made some kind of comment about how she was acting and how she looked. I will never forget what she said in reply, “I’m more of a woman than you’ll ever be.”

We were down in the basement of Linda’s place where people went out to the pool and we were alone at that point. I remember wheeling around and saying to her, “Really? You think putting on a skirt, shirt and jacket makes you a woman? You’re pathetic.” We got into a minor fight there, but I put an end to it. This wasn’t the venue for that. I wasn’t ready to have everyone know. To begin with, many people never liked the fact that we were together. They thought she took advantage of me.

We made it through the party. Later in the evening, the few people still hanging around and were inside with Linda having coffee, including Miss Headcase’s mother. We were outside and it was time to talk. According to Miss Headcase, the whole thing was her fault. She had come on to Barbara. I wasn’t sure about that. The more I had been exposed to Barbara, the less I liked her. I was sure it was mutual. Then, Miss Headcase asked me for a favor: She asked if I could wait until she made a decision about who she wanted to be with. It took real balls to ask that question. It took a great amount of stupidity for me to accept that situation. We decided to make the trip to Hilton Head anyway. The plans had been made. The place had been reserved.

Besides, when it comes to relationships, I’m not a quitter. Whether a lover or a friend, I’ll give it my all so that I can at least walk away knowing I did my best to save it. That’s very much a Della Piana characteristic.

The bitter end

Miss Headcase headed back to Turners Falls after the party, and her mom and I returned to Melrose. On the way, she asked me why Miss Headcase was not coming home. I decided this was as good a time as any to tell her what was going on. She was really mad. She also felt really bad for what I had been going through. I confessed to her that I had a feeling this was going on for some time, but there was no way I could prove it.  She and I had two more days together and I was already on vacation, so we ended up having a good time together. I took her into Boston. We went to some museums, saw a movie and generally hung out together. I drove her to the airport. Two days later, I picked up Miss Headcase and we headed (by car) to Hilton Head.

I have to say that Hilton Head didn’t thrill me. There are three things you absolutely have to like for Hilton Head to be fun:  (1) Tennis; (2) Shopping; and (3) The Beach. I’m not big on any of those, but Miss Headcase wanted to go there. I still can’t figure out why. She really didn’t like any of those things either. Perhaps it should have been a sign that she was drifting off into insanity. Frankly, the best part of the trip was stopping in Charleston, South Carolina. It was really beautiful there — the way you’d expect a charming southern town to be. However, it is not the place to be openly gay. To say that its inhabitants are a bit backwards on social issues would be an understatement.

The condo we were staying in was right on the beach. You could simply get up in the morning, pull back the curtain and be staring at the ocean. It was beautiful, but I knew instantly that the trip had been a mistake and there would be no saving this relationship. I could have stayed home. Instead, I was facing this crap thousands of miles away from my comfort zone.

According to Miss Headcase, she was still confused about her decision and that meant we were not sleeping together. Not that I wanted to at this stage of the game. Every night it was the same. She’d go into the other bedroom so she could call Barbara. I absolutely hated being there, and I was totally relieved when we were forced to evacuate because of Hurricane Hugo. Three days under these conditions were enough for me.

It was a long ride back. There was nothing more that I wanted than to drive all the way back up to Turners Falls and dump Miss Headcase off. That would be the best part of the vacation. However, I was just too tired to make the round trip, and there was no fucking way I was staying in Turners Falls for the night. Instead, we stopped in Melrose for the night. She immediately headed for the phone to let Barbara know that she would be returning the next day.

That marked the bitter end. I drove her to Turners Falls early in the morning. Barbara was positively animated, asking me about the trip and about Hurricane Hugo. She was happy to have Miss Headcase back and, at that point, I was happy to get rid of her. I knew going back to work would be difficult, but at least I had four days to get my act together.

Aftermath

My contact with Miss Headcase after that was simply to ensure that she got her stuff out of the apartment. I know at one point that my anger finally came to the surface, and I told her I wanted the car back. We fought about it for a couple of days, but I finally chalked that demand up to finally having had enough and let it go.

Eventually, Miss Headcase and Barbara moved to Florida. This happened largely because Barbara’s children (they were grown and married) were completely against her relationship with Miss Headcase, particularly because it was so close to their father’s untimely death.  We eventually stopped talking altogether, but after Thalia was born, I did get a call from her at the office one day. Seems she had been talking to a mutual friend who worked in one of the labs who told her I was in a relationship with Beth and that we just had a child together. By then, whatever I had once felt for her was completely gone and I was more annoyed than anything. I told her that I was happy and I really didn’t want to try to be friends. That’ s just not my style. When it’s over, it’s over. Miss Headcase accepted that.

Several months later, I decided to take a trip out to California to see her mother and her sister. I was there for a week and we had a really good time, but her mother confessed that she’d lost weight and hadn’t been feeling well. A few weeks after I got home, she called and told me that she had been diagnosed with colon cancer and was going to have surgery and chemo. Unfortunately, she was gone within six months. That was a really sad time in my life. At the beginning of my relationship with Miss Headcase, I had a contentious relationship with her mother but that changed and we got to be pretty good friends.

Where Miss Headcase is now, I do not know. As of 2002, the web tells me she is still in Florida. Is she still with Barbara? I do not know, nor do I care.  I was happy to end that chapter in my life and my intention was to avoid commitment for a while.

After the “child molester” comment, Miss Headcase headed back to Turners Falls and went right back into the closet. She began to come home less and less, and began to spend more and more time with Barbara. Now, since last night’s post, I’ve had several people write comments on Facebook telling me that Turners Falls is a gem. It’s beautiful. It’s an oasis. It is beautiful, I will give it that. It is a wonderful place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there — even for a limited period of time. There was an undercurrent of homophobia there that extended even to the Hallmark Institute of Photography. If that wasn’t enough, Barbara was a staunch Catholic and started bring Miss Headcase to church on Sundays. Had Miss Headcase not been Miss Headcase, had she had her convictions in place, if she were more comfortable in her own skin — what transpired next may never have happened.

Not only were the Christians (frankly, I can’t tell the difference between Christians and Catholics; the differences are subtle) working on Miss Headcase’s psyche, so was the school. They were convincing her that being outwardly gay was bad; and for God’s sake — do not bring me around. She should be wearing dresses. It was like going back in time to the fifties, and I confess that I was totally freaked out by it. Miss Headcase, on the other hand was buying it “lock, stock and barrel,” as my mother would say. It wasn’t enough that she wasn’t coming home, she now was restricting my visits to TF. There was always something she had to do with Barbara, like take weekly trips to Enfield, Connecticut.

When I finally found out what was going on in Enfield, I have to confess that I laughed like hell. I was almost embarrassed to admit it to people, but I finally did tell a few people. I mentioned in the last post that I was friendly with my landlords (since I’m an R & B fan, we’ll call them Sam & Dave). There was a good reason for this. They were gay, and it was an absolute blast living in their building. We got to be very friendly. While Miss Headcase was away, I’d go up to their apartment on Sunday mornings and we’d have ‘Grapefruit Flips’ for breakfast. (Essentially, these consist of very cold grapefruit juice with a ladle of vodka — preferably a high end vodka — on top; no mixing. Then, you just chug them.) After a few of these, it was easy to tell them what was going on in Enfield.

Barbara was taking Miss Headcase to weekly church-run square dances. Square dances. Apparently, they didn’t have any square dance specialists in TF? Either way, I knew real trouble was on the horizon. While I found this all very disturbing — apparently Miss Headcase was taking the place of Barbara’s husband at these events — I confess that I just had to laugh at the vision of Miss Headcase square dancing that was in my head.

In comes the WTF phone call

Early one evening, I received a phone call from Barbara telling me that Miss Headcase was very sick. I can’t remember exactly what the situation was, but I think it was sold to me as some kind of rabid ‘flu’ or something. She thought that she should come home and be seen by a doctor. Now, of course, I was in a panic. I called my niece and her boyfriend (now her husband) and asked them to take a ride out to Turners Falls with me to pick her up just in case I needed help. They came right over. It was practically the middle of the fucking night when we got up there, and Miss Headcase was virtually unconscious.

For the life of me, I didn’t understand why Barbara hadn’t just put her in the hospital out there. She looked like she belonged in a hospital, and it didn’t look like the flu to me. She was in and out of consciousness. The fact of the matter was that I was not convinced that a hospital out there was wise, given the goings on. We loaded her into the back seat of the car and brought her to Melrose. By the next morning, she was in the Melrose-Wakefield Hospital, where she would stay for at least two weeks.

To this day, I really don’t know what it was — if you can believe that — but I had my theories. Remember that this was either 1987 or 1988. Miss Headcase wasn’t divulging any information about what may have transpired in lovely, picturesque Turners Falls. And believe me when I tell you that gay partners had no rights back then. In fact, the doctors wouldn’t even talk to me because I was not ‘immediate family.’ I told nobody in my family anything about this except my niece and her mother, my sister Mamie.

What did I think it was? Well, let’s start with alcohol poisoning. That could have been it. I knew they were working on Miss Headcase out there — and I mean emotionally, which is something she couldn’t handle. She was in therapy when I met her, but quit immediately after we got together. I told her that this was a mistake. I wasn’t a therapist and I didn’t want to be her therapist. I also told her that our relationship wasn’t going to solve her emotional problems. She had at least confessed to me a couple of months before this incident that she had been drinking too much. Drugs? Who knows? I thought alcohol was a more likely candidate.

All I do know is that they would not release her until she visited with the hospital psychiatrist. She did that, and was released. We went home. I asked her point blank why she had to see the psychiatrist. Miss Headcase told me that it was because she had “lost time” and they wanted to be sure she didn’t have any lingering emotional issues with that. While her explanation made all the sense in the world, I had to wonder if it was the real reason. I still do not know all these years later.

Miss Headcase stayed home with me for about a week. Then, it was time to return to Turners Falls, the Hallmark Institute and Barbara. If you think this is as weird as the situation could get, just stay tuned.

You know, the one thing a blog does is allow you to remember things as flashbacks. That’s probably the only way I’ll be able to remember my early life. This flashback requires the way back machine. I must have been around nine or ten years old, my dad had passed away and we were living in Everett with my grandmother, my aunt and my uncle.

My grandmother was pretty old at that time, and she had suffered several strokes and heart attacks over the years. Oddly enough, I was the only one who could tell when she was going to have a heart attack and that’s because it was usually preceeded by what I now call “nonsense talking.” She would be awake and alert and carrying on a conversation with you but she was making absolutely no sense.

Around this time she also began to hide eggs in her bureau drawers. This is never a good sign, people. If this isn’t an indicator that something is seriously amiss, then there’s something seriously amiss elsewhere as well. In my mind, eggs didn’t get hidden in drawers or anywhere else unless the Easter Bunny was coming.  However, I was just a kid so I accepted whatever I was told and/or asked to do.

So, they asked me to sleep with my grandmother since I was the only one who responded to her heart attacks. Okay. So, if anyone is wondering why I have this thing about sickeness and death, don’t wonder. I mean, seriously, no thought was ever given to what psychological effect this might have on me, particularly so close to losing my own dad to cancer. Of course, it wasn’t that my mom and aunts were callous. They just didn’t get it. There was no focus on psychology whatsoever.

When people ask me about my childhood, I genuinely have no complaints. I consider myself fortunate to have had the parents and sibilings I have, particularly after I see what others have been subjected to. But you’ve just got to admit that this kind of request of a child is a bit over the edge. No? I mean, it could very well be why I avoid doctors and health care in general. Who knows. I don’t like psychiatrists much either, so we’ll probably never find out.