I'm writing and drawing "The Legend of Richy Vegas," right now in Richy Vegas Comics. I signed on for that deal, big time, with Jenna in 1991/92. I'd thought I'd made a terrible mistake by letting that Sara go in 1988, and I was trying to make up for that "mistake" by making it right with my deal with Jenna. I really have to keep telling myself that as I recount painful episode after painful episode in my romantic pursuit of Jenna. I mean, I not only have to write about this shit, I have to DRAW it as well. Fuck!
My psychotic break that lead me to my eventual hospitalization and treatment and diagnosis, in that order, had as its theme the Legend of Richy Vegas. That whole legend, which manifested itself in a blossoming series of hallucinations that took the form of a "recovered memory" from 1989- primarily, but it spun off from there- came after I let go of Jenna; after I did the right thing by letting her know that we could still be friends, and centered around what I thought might have been going on around us. See, I came to think that Jenna had to choose between the lesser of two evils: psychotically obsessed me, or serial date rapist Billy Billiams, whom I thought, after my conciliatory gesture to Jenna, had been courting her and, maybe just by his presence, had offered himself as a protector of her's from me.
Got that? Okay, in the days after I let go of Jenna, that theme started blossoming in my head. Then came the hallucinations about the night I met "Michelle" at the Cannibal Club one night in 1989. In reality, our little community all found out shortly after I'd met Michelle that Billy had attacked Michelle about a week or so before I'd met her, and so, the Legend of Richy Vegas grew from there. When I had a lot of trouble with my medication in 1994/95, the legend only grew further, by leaps and bounds. I was sick for months before I had my medication change. Lots of stuff.
Whelp, I realized after the September 11th attacks that all of my cigarette smoking, drug use, and heavy drinking was a not-very-constructive way of coping with loneliness and being alone a good deal of the time. I'd read in the New York Times where there was an article about how single New Yorkers felt especially vulnerable after the attacks, about how they were afraid of dying alone and all of that. I connected the dots to me, and made a big push to quit smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. The notion that I was trying to find more constructive ways of coping with loneliness and being alone kept me going through all the relapses of the next year, and it's been over fifteen years since I've had a cigarette.
I quit drinking and drugs, many years later, in late 2008. I wanted to improve my relationship with women. One night over at my house, a friend of mine, myself, another guy, and two girls hung out. One of the girls interested me, until I went into my bedroom and found her naked in bed with my drunk-ass friend. I thought she was single because this friend already had a live-in girlfriend.
I few nights later, I had a six pack of Bass, watched Blood Freak on Turner Classic Movies, and had a revelation. "Dude," I thought as I imagined myself talking to my two-timing friend, "This life-style is obviously working out for you just fine, but it's not working out for me at all," and that was my last six pack of beer, my last alcohol to this day, and almost my last drugs. I had some drugs several times after that night, the last time in February 2012.
I thought the twenty-two year old baristas and waitresses were just waiting for me to quit drinking and drugs, and that they'd line up outside my door just waiting to go out with me at the news. Well, a lot of them did line up outside my door, but more to just kind of play games with me some. And so it's continued to this day.
Don't get me wrong, I never once regretted my decision to quit drinking and drugs. It's just that, instead of having my love life immediately start working out the way I wanted, I had to deal with long-buried issues of what I've self-diagnosed as Love Addiction. I've traced this river of personal dysfunction back to it's source, which I've identified as the "need" to always have a love interest for me to think about and aspire to. On Mike Judge's animated series Tales From the Tour Bus, those who knew Tammy Wynette talked about her need to always have a man in her life. Girlfriends weren't easy for me to come by, but love interests were.
In the Fall of 2012, I decided to revive the "what if I turned my back on love" experiment that I had tried only once in 1988 with Sara. That's what led me to let her go, and thus, what led me to believe that I'd made a terrible mistake when I let go of the first woman I really said "no" to from the outset. Funny how that works; the first time I rejected someone in that way, it turns out that she was the one true love of my life (I'm being sarcastic).
I've made a lot of decisions about women that I'm very happy I've made since I decided to to revive that experiment. Why, I have to sit up and count at night the number of intelligent decisions I've made about women, intelligent decisions that I believe stem directly from my decision to revive that experiment. There was the girl who said she'd like to be added to the portraits of problem women in my portrait of my mother as Medusa. There was the really hot receptionist at the print and copy company where I tried to temp. I decided to move on to another temp job rather than keep bugging the powers that be at the printer for work that was not readily forthcoming. I decided to move on to another job rather than attempt to make it all about this receptionist, because I realized for the first time in my life that making it about really beautiful young women in my world was a choice, and not something that the laws on the books required me to do. There was yet another barista that I suspected was trying to teach me an important life lesson about how bad I was to ask out the other baristas at her job. I saw her do that phony hug-as-a-resolution-to-conflict shit to another middle-aged fuck at this coffee shop. She got really pissed off when I started blowing her shit off. I first tried the Facebook friend request move on her, some months after she'd quit that job. I did it as an alternative to asking her out in front of God and everyone. She accepted my friend request. I messaged her in an attempt to start a line of communication with her. She didn't respond. I told another former barista of my move about a year later, and this hippie-hugger-bullshit-artist unfriended me. Good riddance. I figured that this other former barista had relayed all I'd said about how I handled this perp's let's-hug-and-reflect-on-the-error-of-your-ways-you-dirty-old-man bullshit. There was that waitress in that restaurant who decided to punish me because I was a mentally ill guy who wore a t-shirt she didn't like. There was that virgin girl at that business that I can still patronize. There was that virgin girl's friend at that business that I can still patronize. There were other girls at that business that I can still patronize. There was the waitress whom I suspected of switching out boyfriends, and who wanted to rope me in as the loser in her little ritual drama, I reckon. I wrote "My Girlfriend is a Hatesong" about her. That's the one with the immortal lyric, "What else goes on this layer/ perhaps another slice of scorn/ how 'bout I load up on Green Giant/ take a shit, you eat the corn." Right on her heels came the the Invisible Woman. If the real-deal celebrity was wholly innocent of any participation in that whole episode, she can't find her name, even ONCE, on this web site, and she can find maybe six innocuous postings from me on her social media accounts, all told. There have been others more recently. And lastly, I will add that I found out the nature of the bad deals that I readily signed on for back in the day. See the last post, "I'm repeating myself...," or the top of this post for the workings of that deal.
So, fair enough. I'll trade the Legend of Richy Vegas for all that I've reaped from the revival of an experiment that I, Richard Alexander, first tried in 1988 with Sara. The games and bullshit only got even more intense and frequent after I started having successes at parrying all the bullshit these women threw at me. My guess is that a gunfighter mentality took over with a lot of these women. Also, I often wonder who does and does not read this blog amongst those in my everyday-patronizing-businesses world. If even a fraction of the women I've interacted with have read some of these posts, they may be vying for my attention in bogus ways for the same reason that so many women get into Astrology: so that they can read about themselves and have someone's insight into what they are like. If that's the case, they are getting a better deal with me than with any astrologer or psychic.
Anyway, as for letting go of that Richy Vegas stuff, well, I may never fully accomplish that. But, my ability to cope with all kinds of bullshit that really, really does go on, at least in my opinion it goes on, may lessen how important all of that Richy Vegas stuff is to me. Jenna seemed even more happy-go-lucky than ever in the months that followed the incident where I let her go. I remember in September of 1992, at a parking lot party on Guadalupe, how Jenna held forth with the full attention of about six to eight young men as I stood about thirty feet away. That was after my initial hospitalization, but before my second hospitalization due to INTENSE depression. Regardless of what all was real vs. what wasn't, I've never heard about any incident with her and Billy Billiams to this day. Maybe I had something to do with things shaking out a certain way, maybe I didn't. Maybe she didn't even know Billy Billiams. As for me, I was just thinking the other day that I'd better like being by myself, because I've just had to deal with a lot of shit since I've made these major changes, and I will probably have to deal with a lot of of the same kinds of shit before all is said and done.