Letter to BL

B., T. has been out of his mind here. I feel it's been 26 hrs. of name-calling w/ a few little moments of affection. His doctor called to speak to me about my getting a follow-up sonogram, and T. threw the phone across the floor telling us to fuck off. I told her he's gone incompetent/incontinent. She thought of catheterizing him, but part of it is his joy at pissing in his $1.7 million apartment and on the furniture and bedding. I cannot escape. It's like he's my employer 24 hrs. a day for the chance to be in NY, and then I rarely go out, anyway. I've been thought by friends to be in a funk lately. I get too quiet & distant. I feel shame to be lying in pee at night for a place to stay. So when the three women asked us for money -- really, it was four, including my sister -- I ask, on whose back? I've said to him that his bankers don't abuse him when he earns in the market, but he abuses me, who work here. It's as if I think C. should work for her "writer's grant" by sleeping in pee. Also, he doesn't allow the use of the computer -- like many employers -- how would she write? No, she wants a no-strings policy toward monetary gifts to her. My sister says no harm in asking for free money from T., but and now we're less sisters for it -- there is harm in it. He assails me for hours when someone I know approaches him for money. They pretend he's a sane jerk of a rich guy who owes them, but really he's a developmentally disabled alcoholic who doesn't think straight long enough to set up a writer's slush fund. We did (together) working on this get $2,000 for a novelist we knew in Houston, whom Donald Barthelme praised as being the best writer there and whose eight novels have never been pub'd. But I didn't get a chance to tell C. about it, bec. she was so indignant that a rich man of her acquaintance wouldn't just write her a check to live on for a year. This is C.N. I befriended her last Oct. in NY. She's a "giant" but has no pub'd book. She is very gifted and hates my sister, bec. she knows T.'s helped my sister financially -- says my sister is crazy. I tell her my sister is a good artist, a devoted heterosexual girlfriend of certain men over the years, and a healer of old animals. C. says it doesn't matter if I think my sister is talented or if she has cared for a cancer patient or animals. C. owns houses but won't sell one. Bec. I am this very calm person w/ bipolar -- I'm very tall -- people say model-like and usu. quiet -- they ignore the bipolar thing until moments like these then tell their friends I'm mentally ill. So I've thought along the lines of economics again -- had been doing that already. C. is a boss-type, must be in charge, is always right, never wrong, and talented, as I said. A retired lawyer. If I pay her, and she's the boss, she writes her novel and buys restaurant meals w/ the money, then I am a customer of her unpub'd novels? Am I like the school who hires the writer to write? Am I a school? Or a customer buying a carload of her imagination-theory? I don't own houses I could sell. I feel that I should have a place to call my own that is dry & clean & good for doing my own work. If I am a patron, and C. the star-boss who dictates my expenditures ... can you make sense of these dynamics? L., my friend who cut her visit to NY short and wanted compensation from T. for her travel expenses, is set to inherit many millions from her stepfather but didn't buy me lunch for years of poverty in my mother's house. I've been volunteering in literature a lot -- editorial, attendance at readings, help in fundraisers -- all of this is scoffed at. Helping T. is denigrated as hopeless activity for me. C. covers her tracks by saying she is a Marxist/Progressive/atheist -- I've only claimed to be a liberal. I need as the buyer of C.'s talent -- she keeps the rights to her talent? -- to understand the position. I have no home, yet she wants checks from me, and T. abuses me in his home in exchange for paying the bills here. Dump C.? Just quietly avoid her? She's a town gossip. She'll tell everyone she meets to stick up for her right to T.'s money. She hasn't even considered what he already pays in taxes.