Cleaning Up Vomit

Wednesday June 11th, 2008 - Lake Villa, IL

Forgiveness. Ouch. That’s been a tough one for me throughout my life. Everyone has an area of extreme weakness and this is mine. I never had any problem with alcohol or drugs like so many others in show business and life have had. Forgiveness has been my demon.

Some things are just hard to let go. I try to be kind and patient and understanding of the other side of an argument but sometimes none of that works and I blow a gasket. Nobody has ever accused me of failing to voice my unvarnished opinion and sometimes it has not gotten me the results I wanted. I’m learning to behave way better but I still have relapses.

Some of the clashes I’ve had in my life have been justified. Others have been a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some I’ve been able to fix and others not. It’s very rewarding when a broken relationship gets fixed and that was my theme for the day.

My sister Tammy’s birthday is coming up on Sunday which is also Father’s Day. I have not spoken with Tammy for over fifteen years now and it’s like we’ve erased any little bit of family relationship we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have all that much to begin with.

Tammy and my brother Larry lived with my father and step mother along with their son and my half brother Bruce. I grew up with my grandparents mostly but would get taken to visit my brothers and sister on school vacations and summers. We never really gelled and I tried to fit in but just never did. For whatever reason I was always the constant outsider.

Tammy and I had a falling out in 1993 and I am really sorry about that. I said some ugly things I shouldn’t have but it was a very difficult time for me and I was just blowing off a whole lot of steam. That doesn’t make it right but it does explain why I did it. I regret it.

I’ve tried several times to patch things up with her but she wants no part of it. I am very sorry for what I did but I don’t think I should be cast out like a demon forever for it. I’m a human being and I make mistakes and I admit the mistakes I made back then but that was probably the hardest time of my life. I was dealing with a lot of horrible things back then.

I had just had a near fatal car wreck and had broken bones all over my body. I had to be at home 23 hours a day that I wasn’t at physical therapy and one of my roommates had an argument with the other and stole all the furniture in the house to get even. I was screwed.

Those aren’t the best circumstances for brotherly love and I don’t even like going back to that place in my mind right now. It was a bad time. There have been a lot of times since that have been pretty good and others not so much but Tammy and I haven’t talked since.

I woke up really early this morning and wrote her yet another letter. I’ve tried it several times before with no luck. I think I might have gotten one response but it wasn’t positive and then the others were just ignored. Nobody likes to be ignored and I wonder why I try.

I guess it just seems wrong to me to not make an attempt to mend a fence that needs it.
Tammy and I will probably never be brother and sister but we both came from the same polluted gene pool and I have to believe she has her own painful memories of our family. I would think it would help us both heal if we talked about it and I wrote her exactly that.

My brother Larry is two years older and he stopped talking to me a few years ago too. It wasn’t from any arguments, he just kind of drifted away. He has his own life and I was on the road all the time. I tried to contact him a few times but he didn’t respond so I stopped.

I wrote Larry a letter too while I was on a roll and just asked him to forgive me for what I may have done to make him not want to talk to me. I asked Tammy the same thing. This is not easy for anyone to do but those are the things in life that are by far most rewarding.

This situation is like trying to clean up vomit or after a tornado. It’s a big ugly mess and there isn’t really any one place to start. The damage is everywhere and the natural urge we all have is to either walk away from it or find someone else to clean it up. It’s not pretty.

That’s exactly why I attempted to do it yet again. None of this is pretty and it has a deep rooted stranglehold on all of our pasts. There are a lot of people with issues like this so if I can write about my situation maybe it will help someone else with theirs. I sure hope so. I’d hate to think I was getting down in the trenches of all this for nothing. It sure isn’t fun.

I wrote what I sincerely felt and that’s a deep sadness for how things transpired and the deeper regret for the way I handled things. I was SO wrong and who wants to admit that? Nobody. But that’s the way it is so I laid claim to it. I want to allow all of us to heal now.

This whole subject took up most of the space in my head today and still is. How can we patch this whole thing up? Fifteen years is a long time. I’m not angry at her or my brother Larry or Bruce either. They all seem to be furious with me and all I want is to make good.

I got to thinking about my ex partner who embezzled all my money at Zanies. He’s on my ‘no fly’ list and if he asked for forgiveness I‘d have a very hard time with it. That one still stings to the bone and is a big sore spot. I know I should forgive him but it‘s not easy.

Then I got to thinking about my step mother. As a kid she and I never got along. I hated her and I don’t use that word often. I prayed for her slow and painful death and eventually I got it. She died of diabetes a few years ago and it was only then I found forgiveness for her. I heard she did die in pain and I saw how wrong I was to wish bad things on anyone.

I was very sad when I heard she had passed but then I was overcome with a pure feeling of total forgiveness that lasts to this day. Never have I had a single relapse and I see now how bad her situation was from an adult perspective. She’d had a hellish life all along.

Maybe this life is just a big test. Or a school yard filled with lessons. I have no answers. I do know I did my best to clean up a giant pile of vomit today that’s been there for years.
This has nothing to do with comedy but if it works out I’ll have a lot more laughter in me.