From a Cut Chapter in Part 6
During this time Lisa was down in paradise, finishing the spec house we were partners in and doing whatever fucked up things she was doing, which would turn out to be plenty, although the only fucked up thing I knew about at the time was that she was still fucking my next door neighbor Barry, the ex-pro V-baller, and still doing it in my bed, the upstairs one….
I called her once when he was there, although I don’t think it was mid-fuck since she wasn’t out of breath when she answered the phone. Paradoxically, her not being out of breath in answering the phone was key in my deduction that he was there.
By way of explanation, and here’s how easy it is to figure out what Lisa is up to, how inefficiently her mind works in spite of her professional background in perception management: I called about 8 PM her time. I strung out the conversation, asking about the house project, how the dogs were and so forth, meanwhile peppering it here and there with the seemingly casual questions that were my real interest; these queries came between Lisa’s assurances of undying love and how much she missed me and so forth.
Here’s the key information Lisa provided through my casual questions:
One: She was downstairs in our bed reading when I called.
Two: The phone was upstairs on the porch where we keep it, because that’s the only place where the reception is reliable.
This equaled that Lisa was lying about where she was when I called. She had answered the phone at the end of the second ring, a physical impossibility if you’re in the downstairs bed and the phone is upstairs on the porch. Hold on. Maybe an Olympic sprinter could do it, the world’s fastest human, but he’d have to have starting blocks set up on the bed and be quivering in them after having stretched and loosened up on the infield. I’ve never made it from the bed to the upstairs porch in less than four full rings, usually five, in a full-on wind sprint and taking the stairs two at a time. And I’m faster than Lisa.
Plus Lisa was not out of breath when she answered the phone, which I would think she would be had she been quivering on starting blocks on our bed when the phone rang, then outracing me, plus the world’s fastest human.
Lisa was in bed all right, the upstairs office bed adjacent to the porch, although I doubt that she was reading. If she and Barry were fucking, Lisa hadn’t yet gotten to her ah ah ah ah ah pre-orgasmic anthem, which tends to make her out of breath. That’s a possibility.
But how do I know it was Barry in my office bed and not some other shitball motherfucker of my friends or neighbors, or her San Jose Fuckbuddy come for a fuckfest visit? Because out of nowhere in our conversation Lisa came up with this: “That guy Barry is a drunk.” (The office being glassed in, someone inside, Barry, say, stretched out on my bed, would not be able to hear Lisa on the porch.)
“That guy Barry.” I loved that. Like she hardly knew him.
“Really?” I said. “Why do you say that now?” (She’d said it before.)
“Someone mentioned it.”
I kept my trap shut here, figuring Lisa would continue with her hole-excavation to fill the silence. I was meanwhile thinking that for anyone at Big Turkeys to mention that anyone else is a drunk was ridiculous to begin with, given all the drinking that goes on down there. Except Lisa, that is, telling everyone I’m one.
In order to fill in the silence Lisa tells me that two people told her that.
“Who told you?”
“…I forget.”
(Didn’t she think I’d ask who? Apparently not.)
“Come on. You can remember one of them.”
After a pause: “Brian.”
Brian was a guy who’d bought some land from us and who was back in the states.
I emailed Brian, apologized for bothering him with this, fessed up the basic situation with Lisa and her cheating and lying, and asked if he’d told her that Barry was “a drunk” or anything like that. Brian was a fan of my books and liked and respected me. I’m sure he told the truth when he said he hadn’t said that nor anything like that, nor would he, since he, Brian, “drinks a bit” himself. Lisa, of course, was lying*. Barry being a drunk was supposed to mean she has no interest in the guy, which was another claim she’d repeatedly made, sometimes after referring to Barry as “a dumb gringo.” And let’s not forget that his wife is beautiful and he’s never been through the front gate. And let’s not forget that as I write in the spring of 2006 Lisa has currently been spending nights at this house, the house next door to mine down in paradise. (Note: I wrote this passage before Lisa just flat owned up to fuckfesting with Barry, although she was unable to keep her story straight about when they commenced the fuckfesting.
Apparently this sort of thing works when you’re perception managing for toxic waste dumpers and slaughterhouse owners. Or if you want to bomb and invade other countries to seize pipeline routes and oil fields and empire-build to satisfy corporate greed but don’t feel up to admitting the truth of your behavior, since it’s the same behavior for which Nazis were executed at Nuremberg.
Some further symmetry regarding Brian: Last month as I write, February, 2006, about six months after the above summer scene, Brian showed up at Pavones and, according to a gringo friend of mine, who volunteered this, hooked up with Lisa and spent a week or so staying at the cabinas she was residing at (Mira Olas), the two of them being “inseparable” for that week, showing up at The Point for dawn surf sessions together and dining out together every night, and so forth. My caretaker, Marcos (a new one after I ran Roman and his crack head brothers out) said he saw Brian and Lisa on Lisa’s cabina’s porch at 6:30 one morning, Lisa in a bathrobe. This was a couple weeks after Barry left for the states, taking his uncommitted dick with him. Brian’s dick, too, was uncommitted, since by his own account he is happily married — all the fuckbuddies Lisa has had since around the time of my bolt – the six I know about (it would soon become eight) – are married. Lisa’s theory here was that married guys would keep their traps shut about banging her, which would be vital, given that Lisa was still crushed and in mourning about our break up; it might not look good to the pueblo if she was fucking everything in sight, which, it would turn out, she in fact was.
As I now write from the late summer (2006), some whiz-bang revelations involving still more Brian-symmetry have come to light via my down south spies, further proving that life in paradise for the love of my life is a no limits kinda life: Last spring, after spending a week together in San Jose, Lisa and Brian went in as partners on a 60 acre parcel near Pilon – this is briefly mentioned in the book. (I don’t know how much Lisa raised for the piece, but another partner – a female money manager/friend from Montauk – added $650,000 to the development pot.)
But that’s not the real symmetry. The real symmetry is that Lisa and Brian also spent two or three days as Fowlie’s houseguest in California, after which I received a flurry of emails from Brian accusing me of ripping him off in the land “I” sold him, saying the land was “in conflict,” meaning that Fowlie had claim to it. (Hold on. Sound familiar in a general sort of way? Brian is at Fowlie’s with Lisa and then I get accused of being a rip off.)
It just never stops. And this one is downright surreal, if you think about it.
Keep in mind that in the land “I” sold Brian, Lisa was my equal partner. In fact, when Brian came to look at the land, Lisa did the pitching and the showing of the land, herself explaining the land’s history with Fowlie and how I had a very close relationship with Fowlie (which of course I did at the time). (A quick Meanwhile: Upon meeting him and listening to his rap, Lisa branded Brian “a jerk,” saying she hoped he’d buy the land but never come back.) Lisa also explained that I’d secured a document from Fowlie absolving me from any future litigation regarding the land, including the parcel Brian bought. You can Click here to read the document, which is mentioned in the book.
In Brian’s initial email claiming I sold him “tainted” land he brags that he just visited Fowlie (omitting the interesting fact that Lisa was with him), adding what a nice guy Fowlie is.
Although this gets still better (and more surreal) you have to picture what’s already going on: I get an email demanding I return the money (plus a huge profit) from this “jerk” who bought land from me two years ago, while meanwhile he’s screwing the person who was my equal partner in the land when I sold it to him, Brian also having gone in as partners with her on a big land deal, and the two of them were recent houseguests of the guy Brian claims is trying to take the land back from him, and who is a “nice guy,” the nice guy having also branded me a rip off even though he’d assured me via a signed document that I wasn’t a rip off.
(If you’re having trouble wrapping your mind around this, I can’t say that I blame you.)
Some questions came to mind when I got Brian’s lunatic email, and which questions I emailed back to Brian, one being this: Since his partner in the new land deal was right there with him (Lisa), probably looking over his shoulder as he wrote the accusatory email, why didn’t he ask her about getting his money back (plus a huge profit), since she would have to cough up half the refund, having been my equal partner in the alleged rip off of Brian? A good question, no? And since the two of them were right there with the nice guy who was supposedly trying to take the land back, didn’t my former equal partner (Lisa) mention the document the nice guy gave me — in which Brian’s partner/fuckbuddy’s name (Lisa) is mentioned along with mine, and which document Brian in any case already knew about?
Again: Can you wrap your mind around this stuff? No? Right. It is tough.
For the record, Click here for the email exchange I had with this dumb-ass shitball motherfucker.
