Pamela Balluck: THE HYPHENATE • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Pamela Balluck
THE HYPHENATE

I hyphenated my last name on my front-porch mailbox after a harebrained ex-boyfriend from my teens (he then in his late twenties) found me on the Internet in the twenty-first century, persistently emailed (despite initially writing he’d respect no reply as my response—emails I’ve printed and saved for Salt Lake police in case he persists), from a city just seven or eight hours’ drive to my door (how would he find my address?), hyphenation further inspired by information that a now-out-of-state friend is apparently back on meth, someone I’ve known only post-meth and whom I don’t want to know on meth because of what she told me about her own meth M.O. plus because of what she’s posted on Instagram (I Unfollowed my temptation to Comment). If she, during a hometown visit, were to arrive at my door—or, if the twentieth-century boyfriend is still scary enough to surprise me—my hyphenated name implies I’m not living alone.

In the early 1990s, in my hometown Los Angeles, one of my forever friends, an actor, decided to separate from her husband and from the house above Sunset Strip he’d owned before she moved in years before giving birth to their daughter, whom she moved out and into a $3,000-per-month rental house in Beverly Glen, a price her soon-to-be-ex had to help support, because it was now their daughter’s primary residence, and because he hadn’t done what he could have to keep them both with him.

The gal he took up with next looked so much like his ex that I assumed her framed likenesses in the daughter’s Beverly Glen bedroom had been more photos of the child’s mother, my friend. How bizarre for the daughter.

And, imagine being that new woman, knowing she’s a double, a stand-in—a lay-in—for the one he couldn’t hold onto.

Or, perhaps the new woman, instead of feeling second-best, perceived my friend as a first draft—close, but—not the woman her man had been destined for.

The rental house helped provide my friend refuge, if not a feeling of security as a single mother.

Back on a particular 1980s evening, years before the baby, she’d driven the Mercedes she’d purchased before meeting her then-future husband to their home, his house uphill from the Strip and, before the automatic garage door came down behind her lone car, a steel-toed skinhead ducked underneath. The door finished closing, and my friend, outside her car, went into actor mode, drawing for psychological strength upon mental reruns of heroines she’d played on TV. When she offered to push the door button to let him out, he took her up on it, mind blown over what she’d said would occur upon him if he came one step closer. What had his weapon been? I used to remember (everything).

Right after she moved into the rental house, she haunted garage sales for extra-large men’s footwear, then alternately stood them—in turn, wet, muddy, paint-spattered, all intimidatingly humongous—on the mat outside her front door.

But, what was her safeguard against the electric garage door at the rental?

As a child in the early ‘70s, I moved to Montana with my mom’s second family and then moved back to LA to live with my dad after Mom’s death from cancer a few years later.

I moved again from California to Montana in 1993, at which time I broke my best friend there, who had become, in effect, my anchor while adult-I resettled. I broke my anchor.

I rented an apartment in her building off a dirt road off a gravel road off the River Road then was appalled to see that she kept her copy of my key on the inside sill of her unlocked kitchen window, next to her unlocked apartment door.

She was appalled that I ripped or cut up into pieces receipts, any trashable record, including junk mail, then sprinkled the pieces of each thing into various lined waste baskets around my place and that, when I took my trash to Cutoff Road dumpsters, I distributed individual trash bags among various turnout receptacles. She could not believe I lived thinking somebody would dumpster dive to put pieces together and thieve identities.

Just as she didn’t lock her apartment, she didn’t lock her car. Mine was locked, The CLUB was latched and locked to the wheel and the alarm armed.

Here’s proof I broke her: for her job, she was trained on a new computer system or software she caught on so well to that she was recruited (side-job) to travel weekends training others. She took along on her first out-of-state business trip a boyfriend who’d booked Friday night dinner to celebrate at a fine restaurant and, when they drove up to the establishment, in their headlights men in black rushed them and reached for their doors. She screamed and locked hers.

Parking valets—a first.

How might she have responded differently had I not infected her everyday life with my city fears and precautions?

I later helped her ruin our nearly-twenty-five-year friendship for good, after she’s the one who had taught me how to literally see beyond myself, trained me to see—with no more than my BluBlockers—a distant waterfall, a bighorn sheep, a switchback, right in front of me. Since then, I’ve tried to pass that kind of vision on to others, pulling heads out of city sight, out of screens, such as the one across which these words are appearing in type.

Long story short, I’ve been living via I-15 halfway—near-literally and figuratively—between Los Angeles and Montana—Montana and LA—for twenty-five years.

I’ve become more relaxed about many things due to and since my adult years in Montana.

Yet, I’m unapologetically in love with my cross-cut paper shredder and, though I don’t set men’s boots outside my door—you could call me risk-averse or broken myself, but—I do feel more secure within as a hyphenate without. I’m good with that.

A piece of Pamela Balluck’s memoir-in-progress won the Southeast Review Writing Contest and was listed as “Notable” in 2015’s Best American Essays. Her fiction has appeared in, among others, Western Humanities Review (Fiction Prize), Green Mountains Review (Neil Shepard Prize), and Southeast Review (Short Short Finalist). She teaches writing at the University of Utah and serves as an Associate Editor for University of Rhode Island’s Ocean State Review.