Buddy Handler
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
Buddy Handler
25
People and all their weird beliefs terrified Petra. Never mind the fact that she had been practicing a wild array of outlandish beliefs herself. In a bizarre turn of events, she agreed to attend a lecture held by a local clairvoyant. Considered legitimate by many, Patrick aided the police with their unsolved murder and missing persons investigations.
She called Auntie Pat in a panic.
“This is crazy. What am I doing? I can’t possibly go by myself. Will you come with me?”
In retrospect, Pat had to be amazed by the unusual open-mindedness she was exhibiting. Trained in church to resist anything that reeked of New Age beliefs, such an event was well beyond her comfort zone.
“I’d be happy to go. That man has a solid reputation.”
The instincts that drew her toward The Mother as a child had faded away in her addiction and disappeared altogether within a patriarchal religious system. When Petra began spending time with the Grandmothers outside of AA and witnessed, firsthand, some of their practices, she was unnerved. All their crystals, chanting, Course of Miracles rhetoric, lunar and solstice festivals, dancing under moonbeams and astrological charts left her speechless.
She clung to what little she understood of the Father, hanging on to her beliefs for dear life, even though she had adopted the dogma of a church rather than sorting out her own personal spirituality.
On some primal level, she felt drawn to these women. These Grandmothers were so tender toward her hostile beliefs, so open-minded, so full of compassion, acceptance and love. How could she resist them?
So, there she was, watching a clairvoyant’s strange lecture on the awakening of second-sight. Afterward, Patrick took his time going about the room, giving the attendees messages from beyond. He gave Auntie Pat a lovely reading and moved on to Petra. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he relaxed into the communication. Instead of delivering a message, his face drained of color, his jaw clenched and he clamped his mouth shut, the instruction lodged in his throat. She could see it sitting right there!
Why did this always happen to her?
In church, this was a common occurrence. The prophet would go down the line of believers, delivering prophecies, tapping the seekers on the head, many falling to the ground in bouts of ecstasy, but as soon as that hand came near her and that mouth opened, the hand would lift away, the lips shut tight and on to the next. She never questioned them. Those Evangelists were far too elevated for a lay person like her to talk to, much less interrogate. Besides, it was all too obvious. They saw her, the dirty little addict, the liar, the thief, the loser, the con, Satan’s handmaiden.
This time Petra was not afraid to confront him.
“What just happened?”
The clairvoyant looked her dead in the eye and glanced over her left shoulder.
“Your handler says that I am not to interfere with you in any way.”
“WHAT?”
She went crazy in her mind while her poker face thanked him and shook his hand.
“Oh, my God! I have a handler? It’s too perfect! This is exactly what a lying, cheating, manipulating, always re-inventing addict like me needs.”
She began speaking to this handler, consulting Him about anything and everything.
“Hey Buddy, what do you think about this? Hey Buddy, how should I handle this? Hey Buddy, Hey Buddy, Hey Buddy…”
After much repetition, she named this being, who seemed to inhabit her very breath, Buddy Handler.
She wondered if maybe he was the man from her vision, the man with the tear in his eye.
—
Auntie Pat developed an even deeper interest in Petra, having decided that she may very well be clairvoyant. It takes one to know one. She harped on and on about the value of meditation.
“Step 11 says, ‘Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God’. I think it’s time for you to learn how to meditate.”
“I don’t think so. We’ve talked about this before. You know I can’t quiet my mind. It goes crazy when I close my eyes. It’s just not for me.”
The hurdle standing in Petra’s way was a brain on fire. She imagined worse-case scenarios and made elaborate plans to sidestep disaster. Her worries about the future and the past haunted her. Pat found it both frustrating and somewhat amusing. She resisted the temptation to push, shaking her head in wonderment as Petra received communications from the other side.
“Are they accidental?” Pat wondered. “Does she have a special workaround receiver sticking out of her head?”
She envisioned an old, bent-up, broken television antenna—duct tape holding it together—with aluminum foil on the ends. None of it made sense. Auntie Pat had no choice but to attribute the bizarre gift to this Buddy Handler, who she believed to be an angel, maybe even an archangel. At the very least, he appeared to be a spiritual interventionist who could download pertinent information straight into Petra’s brain.
Visions, presenting themselves as cinematic vignettes, blasted through her unhealthy thought patterns, creating brand-new storylines. All it took was the tiniest opening, a few seconds of no thought. This sometimes happened when she drove long distances.
On one such occasion, while driving a winding mountain road, she received a vision answering a question that had plagued her for years.
“Am I a victim or not?”
Auntie Pat’s response to her childhood was short and sweet.
“You were raised by wolves.”
Regarding victimhood: “Well, that remains to be seen.”
In the vision, Petra was standing in front of a drafting table on the edge of a precipice. Below, floating in open space, was the Earth. Laid out before her, across the width of the table, was a blueprint for her upcoming life. She was placing different color pins along her formative years. Each pin represented a singular traumatic event. As she placed a pin that carried an extreme and brutal narrative, she felt a tap on her shoulder.
Buddy Handler, who had been standing to her left side watching, said, “That one is overkill.”
“I have to become an addict and a bad one. Do you have my back or not?”
She was not upset. She loved his concern for her well-being. Of course, he would have her back. She placed the last pin on the blueprint. They shook on it, signed a contract written on raw-edged parchment paper, and following an embrace, Buddy rolled the contract and sealed it with a heavenly insignia.
The entire vision took less than thirty seconds, which was more than enough time to veer off the road into oncoming traffic. Thank goodness her unconscious mind, on autopilot, was an excellent driver.
Petra’s worldview shifted in an instant. She knew, without a doubt, that she was the architect of her life. She understood that becoming an addict was not some horrible failure, but an actual goal.
While she did not know how to reconcile her negative self-image or reckon with repressed memories that haunted her, she was confident that there was a discernible way out. She had a guide and a formidable one at that. She flashed back on Buddy Handler’s face as she placed that last pin on the board. It expressed a genius chess player working out all the moves, all the probabilities, all the ramifications the extra pin brought with it.
He had to be asking himself, “Is awakening possible under such circumstances?”
—
“Oh, my God! Auntie Pat! You won’t believe what just happened.”
She related the experience in its entirety.
Pat, shocked as ever, said, “Now that you’re convinced you’re not a victim, that you designed this entire experience, are you ready to make some of those more difficult amends?”
The two names that came to her mind, in order of perceived difficulty, were Vincent and Tiziana.
She spoke to Fred every once in a while. He was still using. The guy was indestructible. He advised her against contacting him.
“Yeah, I’d leave Vinny alone. He’s still really mad. Plus, he’s married now and has a kid. No, I wouldn’t bother if I were you…He’s miserable, though. Want his number?”
Petra hung up and dialed the number. She didn’t want to give herself time to procrastinate.
“Vincent, it’s me.”
Serious silence, but no hang-up.
“You sound the same. What do you want?”
He sounded the same as well. It was as if no time had passed.
“I wanted to thank you for keeping me alive in New York.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, you know, it was dangerous and I would’ve died if you weren’t there to protect me.”
“Protect you? I got you into that mess.”
“Vincent, you didn’t. I was going to find my way to heroin, regardless. You took care of me. I’m just so grateful you were there… I’m fucking sorry. Sorry about everything…all of it.”
He could hear the silent tears running down her face.
“Yeah, I’m sorry too.”
They talked and talked about everyone and everything. They went over every inch of their past and sorted it all out. It took hours. They laughed about how rotten they were to each other. They laughed until their sides hurt.
“Look, I know you’re married. I don’t want anything from you. I love you…always will…I hope you know that.”
She wondered if they should meet.
“I’d rather you remember me the way I was, if that’s okay? If you want, we can write letters and talk on the phone sometimes.”
Encouraged by how well it went, she placed a call to Tiziana. It had been six years since that awful day at the shop, after which she insisted Daniel also break all ties with his foster sister. She was terrified that Tiziana’s hatred would turn her son against her.
Her amends to him had gone off without a hitch on the ride home from camp.
“I’m just glad you’re back and you’re alright,” said Daniel. “The counselor told me you were mentally ill. It’s good it was just drugs.”
Petra, mortified that the lie she told to protect her so-called reputation had further damaged her son, she continued the drive home, resisting a tsunami of tears.
Tiziana agreed to meet her at the mall. What followed was a much more complicated amends process than expected and took over a year to complete. Petra’s difficulty remembering details interfered with their progress as Tiziana recounted one horror after another.
While Leo was the main perpetrator, her drug use had allowed him to control her. She became absent, neglectful and unmindful as her children suffered abuse right under her nose. Under the influence, she repeated the same noxious behaviors committed by her mother. Patterns, no doubt, passed down through countless generations.
The stream of gut-wrenching examples that poured out of Tiziana were relentless; the tears, and all her pain, took their toll. A few months into the second year, Tiziana began repeating herself. That it took an entire year to recount all the various abuses says it all.
Petra interrupted her, having decided, for the sake of self-preservation, that enough was enough.
“It’s impossible for me to show you how much remorse I feel. I’m sorry for letting you down in every way imaginable. It pains me to say this because I love you so much, but I need you to stop.”
The silence sat like an anvil on her chest.
“I understand if you can’t forgive me. It’s okay. What I am asking is for you to stop bringing up the past so we can have a future. Do you want us to have a future?…Would it be easier if we parted ways? Don’t answer now. Think about it and let me know.”
Tiziana opted for a future. They began a slow, steady process to rebuild their relationship on a new, much improved, foundation.
Daniel graduated from high school, and they moved north to Asheville, closer to Tiziana. She drove forty minutes south, once a week, to see Auntie Pat. Over time, the commute became unsustainable, and Petra looked for a new home group.
Cathy, a vibrant, self-assured woman who carried herself with confident awareness, caught Petra’s attention at a Saturday morning women’s meeting.
As they say in the rooms, “Look for a sponsor who has what you want.”
Following the meeting, she approached her.
“I feel like I know you from somewhere. Oh, God. That sounds like a pickup line.”
“I’ve lived here for years.”
“No, it’s not that…I just moved up here. Where did you move from?”
“Maui.”
“No shit. You didn’t go to AA meetings at Aloha House, did you?”
“Oh, hell yeah. I most certainly did.”
“Remember Diane? I was her assistant for that Drug Awareness Day event.”
“Of course, I remember her. Isn’t this an unusual twist?”
“I was planning on asking anyway, but would you be willing to take me on as a sponsee?”
“Absolutely!”
Cathy was a lifesaver. She brought balance and an array of new life skills to the table. While Petra dangled from ethereal clouds, she provided a much needed practical, common-sense approach to recovery.
“Hey Cathy, thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I have a problem with the maintenance man. He’s a close talker and keeps invading my space. He’s scaring me.”
“Just put your arm out and nicely tell him to step back.”
“You can do that?”
Case in point. She instinctively knew how to handle day-to-day living.
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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography meets fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.